Top 100 Miguel de Unamuno Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

2. “We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

3. “It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

4. “Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

5. “The devil is an angel too.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

6. “Isolation is the worst possible counselor.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

7. “If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

8. “Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth’s sake! This is inhuman.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

9. “That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

10. “Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

11. “Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

12. “Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

13. “My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I’m not selling bread; I’m selling yeast.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

14. “Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

15. “True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

16. “A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

17. “All knowledge has an ultimate goal. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the question.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

18. “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.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

19. “May God deny you peace but give you glory!”

— Miguel de Unamuno

20. “It is not the shilling I give you that counts, but the warmth that it carries with it from my hand.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

21. “At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

22. “The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

23. “To believe in God is to yearn for His existence, and furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

24. “Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

25. “Science says: ‘We must live,’ and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: ‘We must die,’ and seeks how to make us die well.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

26. “A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

27. “If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

28. “Men shout to avoid listening to one another.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

29. “I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affections, feel His invisible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a particular Providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the course of my own destiny.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

30. “Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

31. “The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

32. “Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

33. “Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

34. “Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

35. “The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

36. “If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

37. “Science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

38. “The pessimism that protests and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

39. “None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

40. “Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

41. “Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

42. “Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

43. “Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

44. “My religion is searching for the truth in life and life in the truth, though knowing that I do not have to find it while I live; my religion is fighting incessantly and tirelessly with the unknown.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

45. “The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

46. “Hasta que se llora de veras no se sabe si se tiene o no alma.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

47. “To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

48. “Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

49. “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.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

50. “There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man – that is, the more divine – the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.”

— Miguel de Unamuno