Miguel de Unamuno quotes - page 7

And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit of the tragedy, the very heart of it - the sacrifice of our own individual consciousness upon the alter of the perfected Human Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness. But is there really a tragedy? ...if we could succeed in understanding and feeling that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in surrendering ourselves to Him? Would the stream that flows into the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitterness of the salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its source? would it wish to return to the cloud which drew it life from the sea? is it not joy to feel itself absorbed? (Miguel de Unamuno)
The march, as ever, is toward the future, and he who marches is getting there, even though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the better way!... View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Your neighbor's vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
God, the projection of my I to the infinite - or rather I, the projection of God to the finite - must also be a multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God - that is to say, in order to save the living God - faith's need - the need of the feeling and the imagination - of conceiving Him and feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung from a multitude of ancestors. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Religion is better described than defined and better felt than described. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi) - either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? (Miguel de Unamuno)
A man who had never known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely possess consciousness of himself. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it is all necessary. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
He who bases or thinks he bases his conduct - his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action - upon a dogma or a principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
To believe in God is, in the first instance... to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
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? View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
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. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with good, for I am and have no other. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
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? View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
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. (Miguel de Unamuno)
Act as if you were to die tomorrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
The vain man is in like cause with the avaricious - he takes the mean for the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it, ends by forming our objective. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
Virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno