Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.

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

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

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 in God, 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.

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.

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

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

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

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.

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

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

Isolation is the worst possible counselor.

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.

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

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

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

Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.

What is vanity but the longing to survive?

I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Men shout to avoid listening to one another.

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

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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