Best 105 quotes of Miguel De Unamuno on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

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

Consciousness is a disease.

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.

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

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.

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Isolation is the worst possible counselor.

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.

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

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimistic or pessimistic, but it is our optimism or pessimism of physiological or pathological origin that makes our ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

Men shout to avoid listening to one another.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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