Miguel de Unamuno Quotes
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The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present.
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Was man made for science, or was science made for man?
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The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.
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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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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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Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is inhuman.
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Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
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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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There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.
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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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Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.
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Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity.
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The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.
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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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Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.
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Spiritual Love is born of sorrow. . . . For men love one another with spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground buried beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they know one another and feel one another and feel with one another in their common anguish, and so they pity one another and love one another.
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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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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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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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Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.
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Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.
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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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The pessimism that protests and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism.