Miguel de Unamuno Quotations

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

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

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

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

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.

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.

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

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

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

What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.

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

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.

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

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.

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

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

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

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

Your neighbor's vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you.

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

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

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

May God deny you peace but give you glory!

The will, the will not ever to die, the refusal to resign oneself to death, ceaselessly builds the house of life while the keen blasts and icy winds of reason unceasingly batter at the structure and beat it down.

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

Fear is the start of wisdom.

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

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

The truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

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

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.

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

Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.

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

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

Those faults we do not have, do not bother us.

Men shout to avoid listening to one another.

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

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

The devil is an angel too.

From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jeweled visions of our future.

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

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man.

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

Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.

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

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

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

Isolation is the worst possible counselor.

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

Talking to a peasant one day, I suggested to him the hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a Consciousness or Conscience of the Universe, but that even so it would not be sufficient reason to assume that the soul of every man was immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. And he replied, "Then what good is God?

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimistic or pessimistic, but it is our optimism or pessimism of physiological or pathological origin that makes our ideas.

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

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.

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consciousness is a disease.

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.

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

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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