Ernest Renan Quotes

When you are some-'one', why would you wish to be some-'thing'? ~ Gustave Flaubert

The oblivion, and I'll say even the historical error, are a key factor in the creation of a nation, to the extent that the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality. ~ Ernest Renan

Work is the best thing to make us love life. ~ Ernest Renan

Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people. ~ Ernest Renan

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. ~ Ernest Renan

Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one. ~ 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

Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution. ~ Ernest Renan

The virtue of man is, in a word, the great proof of God. ~ Ernest Renan

Jesus was the greatest religious genius that ever lived. ~ Ernest Renan

O Lord, if there is a Lord, save my soul, if I have a soul...
~ Ernest Renan

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life. ~ 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

Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation. ~ Ernest Renan

the famed French theorist Ernest Renan, who years ago defined the nation as "a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors. ~ Reza Aslan

All history is incomprehensible without Christ. ~ Ernest Renan

Woe to him who becomes useless to human progress! ~ Ernest Renan

Human cruelty took the form of a pact with the deity. A solemn oath was made to kill everything, in which people forbade themselves any display of reason or compassion. A city or a land was devoted to destruction and it was believed an insult to God if one did not observe the abominable oath. ~ Ernest Renan

Man makes holy what he believes. ~ Ernest Renan

Islam has been liberal when it has been weak and violent when it has been strong. ~ Ernest Renan

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true. ~ Ernest Renan

His glory Jesus Christ does not consist in beingplaced without the confines of history; a more real worship is paid to him, by showing that the whole of history is incomprehensible without him. ~ Ernest Renan

Jesus , in some respects, was an anarchist, for he had no idea of civil government . That government seems to him purely and simply an abuse. A great social revolution, in which rank will be overturned, in which all authority in this world will be humiliated, was his dream . ~ Ernest Renan

It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism ... ~ Ernest Renan

A grain of sand leads to the fall of a mountain when the moment has come for the mountain to fall. ~ Ernest Renan

None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled, occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them. ~ Ernest Renan

God, if there is a God, take my soul, if I have a soul. ~ Ernest Renan

True Christianity, which will last forever, comes from the gospel words of Christ not from the epistles of Paul. The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology. ~ Ernest Renan

It is good for everyone to know how to forget. ~ Ernest Renan

In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact. ~ Ernest Renan

The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery. ~ Ernest Renan

A nation has a soul, a spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the desire to live together and to value the common heritage. ~ Ernest Renan

I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life. ~ Ernest Renan

Blessed are the blind, for they know not enough to ask why. ~ Ernest Renan

The man who obeys is nearly always better than the man who commands. ~ Ernest Renan

The ignorance of French society gives one a rough sense of the infinite. ~ Ernest Renan

Sometimes they reasoned thus: "The Messiah ought to do such a thing, now Jesus is the Messiah, therefore Jesus has done such a thing." At other times, by an inverse process, it was said: "Such a thing has happened to Jesus; now Jesus is the Messiah; therefore such a thing was to happen to the Messiah." ~ Ernest Renan

No; that doesn't interest me.'
'That's because you never read a book about it. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air. ~ Ernest Hemingway

I know that the future is scary at times. But there's just no escaping it. ~ Ernest Cline

Out of control judicial activism threatens traditional marriage in America. ~ Ernest Istook

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Defeat is only a defeat when we don't learn anything. ~ Renan Barao

You're going to turn it into a fascist corporate theme park where the few people who can still afford the price of admission no longer have an ounce of freedom. ~ Ernest Cline

You remember Ernest Angley? TV healer. He'd slap people's foreheads - whap! - and they'd flop over, quivering like fish." She hooted in laughter. "I used to love watching him. It was like professional wrestling for Baptists. ~ Daryl Gregory

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Not everything you meet twice is the truth. Not everything you hear twice is the fact, and not everything you ponder over and over can help you! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in turgenev ~ Ernest Hemingway,

You know I don't love any one but you. You shouldn't mind because some one else loved me. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished. ~ William Ernest Hocking

Sometimes when things happen, it's best to run. Solve the problem later, don't think about it then, just run.

Statement from my character, Brian Cain, in the upcoming book, The Final Inning, Dark Days Ahead. ~ Ernest Grant

Not war but love is the reason for a million of miseries around the world I can see a sea full of broken hearts and my question is why? ~ Ernest Bazin

We all have much more in common than we have difference. I would say that about people all over the world. They don't know how much in common that they have ~ Ernest Gaines

If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.
[Apology to the international anti-submarine committee for being absent from several meetings during World War I.] ~ Ernest Rutherford

A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out. ~ Ernest Newman

They had a sound basis of union. Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as "The Holy Trilogies": Star Wars (original and prequel trilogies, in that order), Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. (Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones films, from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward, didn't exist. I tended to agree.)
I also absorbed the complete filmographies of each of his favorite directors. Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith.
I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue. ~ Ernest Cline

You are killing me, fish... ~ Ernest Hemingway,

It takes just a step to meet a potential customer! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

He had thought of childhood as something intimate and pure, inside his home, his family. Instead of that, in Deborah's school he had been disturbed and thrilled by the presence all around him of something wild, barbaric, dark, compounded of the city streets, of surging crowds, of rushing feet, of turmoil, filth, disease and death, of poverty and vice and crime. ~ Ernest Poole

Should I pity so and so?" I asked. I gave his name but he delights so in giving it himself that I feel there is no need to give it for him.
"No. He's vicious. He's a corrupter and he's truly vicious."
"But he's supposed to be a good writer."
"He's not," she said. "He's just a showman and he corrupts for the pleasure of corruption and he leads people into other vicious practices as well. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Memory is hunger. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Nature will not let us stay in any one place for too long. She will let us stay just long enough to gather the experience necessary to the unfolding and advancement of the soul. This is a wise provision, for should we stay there too long, we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible. Nature demands change in order that we may advance. ~ Ernest Holmes

The road that connects our thoughts to the ears of others is our tongue. What travel on this road is our word. Our action is the energy which transmits our emotions to the eyes of others and causes a great change in their minds ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The best way to become a writer is to go off and write. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

With her mouth closed she was a rather pretty girl. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

We can no more do without spirituality than we can do without food, shelter, or clothing. ~ Ernest Holmes

Where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Robert Jordan knew that now his papers were being examined by the man who could not read. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Silence can answer the question words may fail to answer. If you want to know what silence can do, keep silence! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah