69 Quotes by Ernest Renan

History is as much an art as a science.

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.

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.

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.

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

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

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

Every rebel is, with us, more or less a soldier who has missed his vocation, a being made for a heroic life ... The European race is a race of masters and soldiers. If you reduce this noble race to the work in a slave's prison like Negroes or Chinamen, it will rebel.

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