Miguel de Unamuno > Quotes

“Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“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”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Life is doubt,
And faith without doubt is nothing but death.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“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.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“¿Y qué es amor? ¿Quién definió el amor? Amor definido deja de serlo...”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla

“It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Hasta que se llora de veras no se sabe si se tiene o no alma.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla

“That which the fascists hate, above all else, is intelligence.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Warmth, warmth, more warmth! For we are dying of cold and not darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“Piensa el sentimiento, siente el pensamiento."

(roughly translated, "Think about the emotional and feel the intellectual")”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“And the secret of human life, the universal secret, the root secret from which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more life, the furious and insatiable desire to be everything else without ever ceasing to be ourselves, to take possession of the entire universe without letting the universe take possession of us and absorb us; it is the desire to be someone else without ceasing to be myself, and continue being myself at the same time I am someone else...”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Men shout to avoid listening to one another.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, San Manuel Bueno, mártir, y tres historias más

“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.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla

“Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“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.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what they're talking about.”
― Miguel De Unamuno

“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?”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“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.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“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.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“No os quepais en el cerebro lo que os puede caber en el bolsillo. Y al contrario, ¡no os quepais en el bolsillo lo que os puede caber en el cerebro!”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla. Abel Sánchez. Tres Novelas Ejemplares y un Prólogo.

“The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life