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Miguel de Unamuno

178 quotes

“El uso estropea y hasta destruye toda belleza. La función más noble de los objetos es la de ser contemplados.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Niebla [Mist] (1914)
“All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Niebla [Mist] (1914)
“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.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Niebla [Mist] (1914)
“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 (1864–1936) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Niebla [Mist] (1914)
“The devil is an angel too.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo [Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue] (1920); Two Mothers
“There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo [Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue] (1920); Two Mothers
“Isolation is the worst possible counselor.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is sad not to be loved, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fe que no duda es fe muerta.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: La Agonía del Cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity) (1931)
“We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are at least two things that clearly can be attributed to the Basques: the Society of Jesus and the Republic of Chile.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recalled by Pedro Laín Entralgo in the article Chile al trasluz, published in the periodical La revista Alférez (1949)
“The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies—above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. The cultivation of any branch of science — of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of philology — may be a work of differentiated specialization, and even so, only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Little can be hoped for from a ruler... who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe, like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a hole and enclosing it with steel.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy of proving can be proven, nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge as the Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is another; and... perhaps there is an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And he arrives at the cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine had already anticipated... "I think therefore I am," can only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of "I am," which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is a knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek to join in wedlock life and reason!”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of a thing, the effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being, self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy, although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, do not recognize it?”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the inquiry into the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore," the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depth of my spirit with the blood of divinity.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions, and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an animal that guards its dead.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The wretched consciousness shrinks from it own annihilation, and just as an animal spirit newly severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs desire to possess another life than that of the world itself.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am the center of my universe, the center of the universe, and in my supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!" What is a man profited if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul? (Matt. xvi. 26).”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Egoism you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," we are told, the presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said "Love thyself." And nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once the needs of hunger are satisfied — and they are soon satisfied — the vanity, the necessity — for it is a necessity — arises of imposing ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts even of his weakness and his misfortunes, for want of anything better to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention, struts about with a bandaged finger.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rousseau has said in his Emile (book iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports it because it is his. ...The essential thing is to think differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists he is a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical. It is from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions — namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element predominating.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real sin — perhaps it is a sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission — is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal — that is, a heretic — is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible — the Bible, or a society of men — the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offense to the eyes of reason has to be postulated.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out, that in France and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget skepticism in those who receive them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter — from seeking to believe with the reason and not with the life.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of a dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational... Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic category.”
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source