Unamuno Quotes & Sayings

Life is doubt,
And faith without doubt is nothing but death. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

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

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith. -Miguel de Unamuno, philosopher and writer (1864-1936) — 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

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

Isolation is the worst possible counselor. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

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

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

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

Those faults we do not have, do not bother us. — Miguel De Unamuno

I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affections, feel His invisible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a particular Providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the course of my own destiny. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jeweled visions of our future. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

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

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? — Miguel De Unamuno

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life. — Miguel De Unamuno

Sometimes to be silent is to lie. — 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

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

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

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. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, 'Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?' And the sage answered him, 'Precisely for that reason - because it does not avail. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them. — Miguel De Unamuno

Fear is the start of wisdom. — Miguel De Unamuno

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. — 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 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

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

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

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. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. — Miguel De Unamuno

Your neighbor's vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. — 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

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

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas. — 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

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

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

That which the fascists hate, above all else, is intelligence. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. — Miguel De Unamuno

The devil is an angel too. — 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

Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible. — Miguel De Unamuno

We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past. — Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

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

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