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.

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Source, in full

“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).

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ernest Renan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.