Ernest Renan quotes

" The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life. " # Progress # Truth # Sacrifice

" All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles. " # Principles

" I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life. " # Death and Dying

" To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed. " # Goodness # Freedom # Power

" The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death. " # Greatness # Freedom # Power

" As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost. " # Heroes and Heroism # Understanding # Masses

" Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal? " # Jesus Christ # Death and Dying # Dreams

" Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him. " # Jesus Christ # Love # Friends and Friendship

" Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking. " # Opinions

" To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious. " # Authority # Age and Aging # Freedom