Ernest Renan Quotes
Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Semitic philologist, historian, and philosopher of religion and one of the most influential and controversial public intellectuals of nineteenth-century France. After abandoning seminary studies for academic philology, he produced his Life of Jesus in 1863, presenting Christ as a charismatic Galilean teacher stripped of supernatural elements, and provoking one of the great religious controversies of the century. The quotes below are attributed to Ernest Renan, organized by topic.
Browse Ernest Renan by topic
Ernest Renan on Freedom
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“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.”
Letter to his elder sister Henriette (1841). -
“All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient.”
Des Religions de l’antiquité et leurs derniers historiens”, Mondes , vol. 23, no. 2 (1853) p. 835, quoted in Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Ernest Renan on God
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Attributed to Ernest Renan:
“Religion is born of the soul before it is articulated as doctrine.”
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“The Semites did not understand the variety, the plurality, the genders in God: the word goddess in Hebrew is the most horrible barbarism.”
pp. 5–6. | As translated in Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science , trans. Sonia Wichmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 95.
Ernest Renan on Knowledge
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Attributed to Ernest Renan:
“Science gives ever-better questions, never final answers.”
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“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.”
Orlando, in Caliban , act 2, sc. 1 (1878). -
“Orlando, in Caliban , act 2, sc. 1 (1878).”
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.
Ernest Renan on Nature
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“[L]e communisme étant contraire à la nature humaine.”
Communism is in conflict with human nature. | Les Apôtres (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1866), p. 242. -
“Communism is in conflict with human nature.”
[L]e communisme étant contraire à la nature humaine.
Ernest Renan on Politics
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Attributed to Ernest Renan:
“A nation is a daily plebiscite.”
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Attributed to Ernest Renan:
“The shared past is the patrimony of nations more truly than territory or blood.”
Ernest Renan on Truth
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Attributed to Ernest Renan:
“The truth is sad, but it makes us free.”