Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Miguel de Unamuno

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

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

It is truer to say that martyrs create faith more than faith creates martyrs.

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.

A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.

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

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

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.

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

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.

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

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

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

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

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.

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.

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

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

If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory.

Consciousness is a disease.

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

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.

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.

We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.

Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.

Piensa el sentimiento, siente el pensamiento." (roughly translated, "Think about the emotional and feel the intellectual")

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.

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

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

Men shout to avoid listening to one another.

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.

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

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

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

Science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.

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

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.

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

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

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.

The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.

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.

None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.

I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the course of my own destiny.

Philosophy fulfills the need to create for ourselves a single and complete concept of the world and of life.

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.

Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling

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

May God deny you peace but give you glory!