Best 105 quotes of Miguel De Unamuno on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Talking to a peasant one day, I suggested to him the hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a Consciousness or Conscience of the Universe, but that even so it would not be sufficient reason to assume that the soul of every man was immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. And he replied, "Then what good is God?

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

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

The devil is an angel too.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

What is vanity but the longing to survive?

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

Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself - that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks - he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech - this thing that they call a social product - was made for lying.

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

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?

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

A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, ‘Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?’ And the sage answered him, ‘Precisely for that reason—because it does not avail.

Cásate con la mujer que te quiera, aunque no la quieras tú. Es mejor casarte para que le conquisten a uno el amor que para conquistarlo.

Casi el único valor de las grandes obras maestras del ingenio humano consiste en haber provocado un libro de crítica o de comentario.

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

¡Hay que vivir! Y él me enseñó a vivir, él nos enseñó a vivir, a sentir la vida, a sentir el sentido de la vida, a sumergirnos en el alma de la montaña, en el alma del lago, en el alma del pueblo de la aldea, a perdernos en ellas para quedar en ellas.

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

No, el león no podía ni debía burlarse de Don Quijote, pues las fieras jamás se burlan. Los animales son enteramente serios y sinceros, sin que en ellos quepa socarronería ni malicia. A los animales les basta lo que la naturaleza les da.

No hay más arte mnemotécnica que llevar un libro de memorias en el bolsillo. Ya lo decía mi inolvidable don Leoncio: ¡no metáis en la cabeza lo que os quepa en el bolsillo!

¡No metáis en la cabeza lo que os quepa en el bolsillo! ¡No metáis en el bolsillo lo que os quepa en la cabeza!" "No ye may thrust your head in what I fit in your pocket! No ye may thrust in his pocket that you fit on the head!" "Cebinize sığanı kafanıza sokmayın! Kafanıza sığanı cebinize tıkmayın!