Unamuno Quotes

“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.

“I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son.

What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap?”
― Martin Gardner

“¡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!”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla

“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!”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla

“Tímido y sin estrategia frente al mundo y, sobre todo, frente al amor, Unamuno supo parapetarse entre sus medias luces del norte, salir a dar gritos y vivir emboscado, a la defensiva en su agresividad. Agresividad hosca de alguien que se esconde detrás de sus propias voces como una braña.”
― María Zambrano, Unamuno

“And the end of life is to fashion a soul, an immortal soul; a soul of one's own making. Because at the hour of death one bequeaths a skeleton to the earth, but a soul, a piece of work, to history. Or such is the case when one has lived, that is, when one has wrestled with the life that passes, wrestled it for the prize of the life that remains. And life, what is life? Even more tragic, what is truth?”
― Miguel de Unamuno, La agonía del cristianismo

“Unamuno remarked that John the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola did not reject rationality, nor did they distrust scientific knowledge; what led them to their mysticism was simply the perception of "an intolerable disparity between the hugness of their desire and the smallness of reality”
― Simon Leys