Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

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

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

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

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

Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before all and above all, wishing that God may exist.

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.

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

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.

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.

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

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