43 quotes
I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.
Ernest Renan: a Critical Biography (1964)
There is nothing more motionless than the nonentity who has never lived the intellectual life, or the dullard who has never seen aught but one side of things. The way not to vary is not to think.
The Future of Science (1890)
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.
Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus) (1863)
I would by far have an immoral people than a fanatical people for immoral masses are by no means difficult to deal with while fanatical masses reduce the world to a state of imbecility.
The Future of Science (1890)
It is much to be feared that the last expression of democracy may be a social state with a degenerate populace having no other aim than to indulge in the ignoble appetites of the vulgar.
To rule the imperial population, behold our vocation.
The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France (1871)
Inequality is one of nature's written laws, it is the consequence of liberty and the liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
The Future of Science (1890)
You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect.
Ernest Renan: a Critical Biography (1964)
We aspire not to equality but to domination. Countries inhabited by foreign races must become again countries of serfs, farm laborers, and factory workers. The goal is not to suppress inequities, but, rather, to amplify them and to make of them a matter of course.
The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France (1871)
The regeneration of the inferior or bastard races by the superior ones is consistent with God's plans for humanity. The man of the people, in our countries, is always a fallen aristocrat; his hands are made to handle the sword rather than the laborer's tools. He prefers warring to working, that is, he returns to his original calling.
The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France (1871)
Science has no enemies save those who consider truth as useless and making no difference, and those who granting to truth its priceless value profess to get at it by other roads than those of criticism and rational investigation.
The Future of Science (1890)
Thus, the Semitic race is recognizable almost solely through negative characteristics: it has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science, nor philosophy, nor fiction, nor plastic arts, nor civil life; in sum an absence of complexity, of nuance, an exclusive sentiment of unity.
Histoire générale et système comparé des langues semitiques (1855)
Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his [Jesus] 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?
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?
Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus) (1863)
Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or 'surrender' as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from non-believers into the bargain.
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.
Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus) (1863)
The lofty serenity of science only becomes possible on the condition of impartial criticism, which without regard for the beliefs of a certain portion of humanity, handles its imperturbable instrument with the inflexibility of the geometrician, without anger and without pity. The critic never insults.
The Future of Science (1890)
I, as a man of culture, do not find any evil in myself, and I am impelled spontaneously towards what seems to me the most noble. If all others had as much culture as myself, they would all, like myself, be incapable of doing an evil act. Then it might be said with truth: you are gods and sons of the Most High.
The Future of Science (1890)
Our principle is that we should regulate our present life just as if the future life did not exist, that it is never justifiable to refer to what is beyond in extenuation of any social condition or action. To appeal incessantly to the future life is to deaden the spirit of reform, to relax the zeal for the rational organization of humanity.
The Future of Science (1890)
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.