Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Fear is the start of wisdom.

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

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.

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.

Consciousness is a disease.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

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

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

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.

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

Men shout to avoid listening to one another.

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.

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

What is vanity but the longing to survive?

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

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

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

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

The devil is an angel too.

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