Ernest Renan

Communism is in conflict with human nature.

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.

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.

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.

Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.

God, if there is a God, take my soul, if I have a soul.

No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.

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.

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

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.

Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.