Ernest Renan

Who was Ernest Renan?

Joseph Ernest Renan was a French expert of Middle East ancient languages and civilizations, philosopher and writer, devoted to his native province of Brittany. He is best known for his influential historical works on early Christianity and his political theories, especially concerning nationalism and national identity. Renan is credited as being among the first scholars to advance the Khazar theory, which held that Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of Turkic peoples who had adopted Jewish religion and migrated to Western Europe following the collapse of their khanate.

Famous Quotes:

• Communism is in conflict with human nature.
• I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.
• When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
• 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?
• As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to mankind. I see no limit to the horizon which opens before him.
• Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Man makes holy what he believes.