The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life.
Ernest Renan
The simplest school boy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
Ernest Renan
As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to mankind. I see no limit to the horizon which opens before him.
Ernest Renan
No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.
Ernest Renan
He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.
Ernest Renan
Man makes holy what he believes.
Ernest Renan
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?
Ernest Renan
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.
Ernest Renan
Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
Ernest Renan
The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.
Ernest Renan
I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.
Ernest Renan
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.