Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

Miguel de Unamuno presents a blunt reflection on life, emotion and humanity for curious minds.

71 quotes

1. The devil is an angel too.

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

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

4. Isolation is the worst possible counselor.

5. Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.

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

7. These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

8. Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

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

10. The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies-above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.

11. 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.

12. Consciousness is a disease.

13. Everything vital is, not only irrational, but anti-rational, and everything rational is anti-vital.

14. Pantheism is said... to be merely atheism in disguise.

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

16. La verdadera ciencia ensena, por encima de todo, a dudar y a ser ignorante.

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

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

19. Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

20. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

21. The intellectual world is divided into two classes - dilettantes, on the one hand, and pedants, on the other.

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

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

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

25. Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky.

26. One of those leaders of what they call the social revolution has said that religion is the opiate of the people. Opium...opium...opium, yes. Let us give them opium so that they can sleep and dream.

27. Besos que vienen riendo, luego llorando se van, y en ellos se va la vida, que nunca mas volvera.

28. Contra los valores afectivos no valen razones, porque las razones no son nada mas que razones, es decir, ni siquiera verdad.

29. Creo en Dios porque creo a Dios.

30. El modo de dar una vez en el clavo es dar cien veces en la herradura.

31. Existe gente que esta tan llena de sentido comun que no le queda el mas pequeno rincon para el sentido propio.

32. La envidia es mil veces mas terrible que el hambre, porque es hambre espiritual.

33. La filosofia responde a la necesidad de hacernos una concepcion unitaria y total del mundo y de la vida.

34. Lo sabe todo, absolutamente todo. Figurense lo tonto que sera.

35. Procuremos mas ser padres de nuestro porvenir que hijos de nuestro pasado.

36. Tu desconfianza me inquieta y tu silencio me ofende.

37. Vencereis pero no convencereis.

38. ?Que inventen ellos!

39. If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.

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

41. We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.

42. A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.

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

44. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.

45. My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.

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

47. Was man made for science, or was science made for man?

48. 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.

49. Science says: 'We must live,' and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: 'We must die,' and seeks how to make us die well.

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

51. Men shout to avoid listening to one another.

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

53. The moment love is equated with happiness, it is satisfied — and is no longer love. The satisfied, the happy ones, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.

54. The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity.

55. Is there anything more terrible than a "call"? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.

56. The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.

57. Spiritual Love is born of sorrow. . . . For men love one another with spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground buried beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they know one another and feel one another and feel with one another in their common anguish, and so they pity one another and love one another.

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

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

60. 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.

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

62. Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.

63. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is inhuman.

64. 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.

65. Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

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

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

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

69. Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity.

70. That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.

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