Miguel de Unamuno Quotes
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Was man made for science, or was science made for man?
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The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.
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Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.
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There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.
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If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.
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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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None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.
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Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.
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True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.
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Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is inhuman.
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Those faults we do not have, do not bother us.
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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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We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions — perhaps so that we could believe in them.
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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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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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The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.
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Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.
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Is there anything more terrible than a "call"? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.
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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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From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jeweled visions of our future.
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We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.