Miguel de Unamuno Quotes
-
Was man made for science, or was science made for man?
-
If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.
-
The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.
-
While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.
-
There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.
-
Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.
-
The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.
-
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.
-
True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.
-
Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.
-
Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.
-
None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.
-
Those faults we do not have, do not bother us.
-
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is inhuman.
-
Men shout to avoid listening to one another.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.
-
To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.
-
From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jeweled visions of our future.
-
Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.
-
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?
-
Dream abides; it is the only things that abides; vision abides.
-
Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.