Miguel De Unamuno Quotes

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.

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

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

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Fear is the start of wisdom.

Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.

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

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.

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.

Everything that exalts and expands consciousness is good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.

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

May God deny you peace but give you glory!

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

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

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

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.

Dream abides; it is the only things that abides; vision abides.

Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.

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

The devil is an angel too.

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

They will conquer but they will not convince.

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

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

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

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

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