Miguel de Unamuno Quotes
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He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.
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The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present.
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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.
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Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.
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The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.
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Was man made for science, or was science made for man?
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Talking to a peasant one day, I suggested to him the hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a Consciousness or Conscience of the Universe, but that even so it would not be sufficient reason to assume that the soul of every man was immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. And he replied, "Then what good is God?
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Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
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To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.
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None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.
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True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.
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There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.
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While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.
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Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.
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Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.
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Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.
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The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.
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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.
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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.
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Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.
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Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.
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Men shout to avoid listening to one another.
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Dream abides; it is the only things that abides; vision abides.
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Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.