Miguel de Unamuno quotes - page 2

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas. (Miguel de Unamuno)
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? View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Piensa el sentimiento, siente el pensamiento." (roughly translated, "Think about the emotional and feel the intellectual") View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable. ...The unknowable, if it is something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one find one's own nothingness?... Carlyle answers (Past and Present, book iii, chap. xi.). "The latest Gospel in the world is, Know thy work and do it. Know thyself: long enough has that poor self of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to know it, I believe! Think it thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like Hercules. That will be thine better plan." ...and what is my work? - without thinking about myself, is to love God.... And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself more than God, am I not loving myself in God? View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to accept it and accept it as it is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the "trap." But it has been said by Calderón that "to seek to persuade a man that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not console him for them, but it is another misfortune in addition." And furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de Estella said. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
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. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for the never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled. And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! [Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate: All hope abandon, ye who enter in] Do not destroy time! View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
In the root of the word "faith" itself... there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we perceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the person that gives us hope, that we believe, not directly or immediately in truth itself or in hope itself. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills without its tedium, and without death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam... And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of the eternal recurrence which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality? View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
I have told you that... we know nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save what we pity. (Miguel de Unamuno)
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. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, "How dieth the wise man? View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
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. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
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. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much. (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. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Men shout to avoid listening to one another. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno