Miguel De Unamuno Quotes

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

Sometimes to be silent is to lie.

And the secret of human life, the universal secret, the root secret from which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more life, the furious and insatiable desire to be everything else without ever ceasing to be ourselves, to take possession of the entire universe without letting the universe take possession of us and absorb us; it is the desire to be someone else without ceasing to be myself, and continue being myself at the same time I am someone else ...

If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.

To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.

The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.

To believe in God is to yearn for His existence, and furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.

Everything that exalts and expands consciousness is good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.

All knowledge has an ultimate goal. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the question.

Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling

He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.

My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.

To say that everything is idea or that everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or spirit, just as my consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures forever.

The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.

There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.

Faith is, before all and above all, wishing God may exist.

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.

We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions - perhaps so that we could believe in them.

Hell has been conceived as a police institution, to inspire fear in this world. But the worst of it all is that it no longer frightens anyone, and therefore it will have to be closed down.

The tears of anguish irritate and excite; but those of repentance are the ones that wash.

Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.

¡No metáis en la cabeza lo que os quepa en el bolsillo! ¡No metáis en el bolsillo lo que os quepa en la cabeza!"

"No ye may thrust your head in what I fit in your pocket! No ye may thrust in his pocket that you fit on the head!"

"Cebinize sığanı kafanıza sokmayın! Kafanıza sığanı cebinize tıkmayın!

Warmth, warmth, more warmth! For we are dying of cold and not darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.

Science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

Fear is the start of wisdom.

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

Consciousness (conscientia) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which a love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God.

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.

The pessimism that protests and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism.

We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.

May God deny you peace but give you glory!

While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.

Yes, yes, I see it all! - an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist - for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what they're talking about.

My religion is searching for the truth in life and life in the truth, though knowing that I do not have to find it while I live; my religion is fighting incessantly and tirelessly with the unknown.

Cure yourself of the inclination to bother about how you look to other people. Be concerned only ... with the idea God has of you.

The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.

We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.

It is truer to say that martyrs create faith more than faith creates martyrs.

A faith which does not doubt is a dead faith.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present.

Sow the living part of yourselves in the furrow of life.

At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right

What is vanity but the longing to survive?

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.

Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.

And usually [the philosopher] philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.

Philosophy fulfills the need to create for ourselves a single and complete concept of the world and of life.

There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.

Beneath the current of our existence and within it, there is another current flowing in the opposite direction. In this life we go from yesterday to tomorrow, but there we go from tomorrow to yesterday. The web of life is being woven and unraveled at the same time. And from time to time we get breaths and vapors and even mysterious murmurs from that other world, from that interior of our own world. The inner heart of history is a counter-history; it is a process which inverts the course of history. The subterranean river flows from the sea and back to its source.

Because Augustus was not a hiker, but a walker of life

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.

I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself - that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks - he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech - this thing that they call a social product - was made for lying.

Dream abides; it is the only things that abides; vision abides.

Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.

There are people who are so full of common sense that they haven't the slightest cranny left for their own sense.

Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.

It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.

The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.

Piensa el sentimiento, siente el pensamiento."
(roughly translated, "Think about the emotional and feel the intellectual")

Those who say they believe in God, and yet neither love nor fear him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them that God exists. Those who believe that they believe inGod but without any passion in their heart, any anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair, even in their consolation, believe only in the God-idea, not in God.

Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.

Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant.

Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary system is itself but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the Universe, in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine and co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself, and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear. And if all the consciousness of all beings unite in their entirety in the universal consciousness, this consciousness - that is to say, God - is all.
In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and die within us, and their birth and death constitute our life. And their sudden and violent death constitutes our pain. And in like manner, in the heart of God consciousnesses are born and die - but do they die? - and their births and deaths constitute His life.
If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it; and is it possible for any idea in this Supreme Consciousness to be completely blotted out? After I have died, God will go on remembering me, and to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness sustained by the Supreme Consciousness, is not that, perhap

It is not the shilling I give you that counts, but the warmth that it carries with it from my hand.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.

Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.