Miguel De Unamuno Quotes

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

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.

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Because Augustus was not a hiker, but a walker of life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men shout to avoid listening to one another.

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

What is vanity but the longing to survive?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.

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

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

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

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

May God deny you peace but give you glory!

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes to be silent is to lie.

Fear is the start of wisdom.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

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

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

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

Consciousness is a disease.

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

The devil is an angel too.

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

Isolation is the worst possible counselor.

Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.

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.

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

Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A faith which does not doubt is a dead faith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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