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Ernest Renan
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Ernest Renan

philosopher, historian, writer, professor, archaeologist, orientalist, literary critic, philologist, theologian

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1823  – 1892

Joseph Ernest Renan was a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, writing on Semitic languages and civilizations, historian of religion, philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and critic. He wrote works on the origins of early Christianity, and espoused popular political theories especially concerning nationalism, national identity, and the superiority of White people over other human races. Renan is among the first scholars to advance the debunked Khazar theory, which held that Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of the Khazars, Turkic peoples who had adopted the Jewish religion and allegedly migrated to central and eastern Europe following the collapse of their khanate. On this basis he alleged that the Jews were "an incomplete race."

All Quotes by Ernest Renan

“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.”
— Ernest Renan
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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.”
— Ernest Renan
“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?”
— Ernest Renan
“I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.”
— Ernest Renan
“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
“Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation”
— Ernest Renan
“The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.”
— Ernest Renan
“God, if there is a God, take my soul, if I have a soul.”
— Ernest Renan
“Man is not on this earth merely to be happy, or even to be simply honest. He is there to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility and to surmount the vulgarity of almost everybody.”
— Ernest Renan
“The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.”
— Ernest Renan