Unamuno Quotes

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

The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son.

What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap? ~ Martin Gardner

The pessimism that protests and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Consistent or inconsistent, no one is exempt from the mystery of the self. Probably we are all inconsistent. The world is just too complicated for a person to be able to afford the luxury of reconciling all of his beliefs with each other. Tension and confusion are important in a world where many decisions must be made quickly. Miguel de Unamuno once said, 'If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.' I would say that we all are in the same boast as the Zen master who, after contradicting himself several times in a row, said to the confused Doko, 'I cannot understand myself.'. ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Memory is the basis of individual personality," Miguel de Unamuno writes, "just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future. ~ Christian Wiman

Science is a cemetary of dead ideas. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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? ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Man dies of cold, not of darkness. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

A faith which does not doubt is a dead faith. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

It is truer to say that martyrs create faith more than faith creates martyrs. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

What is vanity but the longing to survive? ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

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

Faith is, before all and above all, wishing God may exist. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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 ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

Fear is the start of wisdom. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Dream abides; it is the only things that abides; vision abides. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Because Augustus was not a hiker, but a walker of life ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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 ~ Miguel De Unamuno

May God deny you peace but give you glory! ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

¡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! ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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 ... ~ Miguel De Unamuno

There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

The eternal, not the modern, is what I love: the modern will be antiquated and grotesque in ten years, when the fashion passes. - MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO ~ Clive James

The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Sow the living part of yourselves in the furrow of life. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Sometimes to be silent is to lie. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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

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 ~ Miguel De Unamuno

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