Top 100 Miguel de Unamuno Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “Hell has been conceived as a police institution, to inspire fear in this world. But the worst of it all is that it no longer frightens anyone, and therefore it will have to be closed down.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

52. “We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

53. “Sumido en la niebla de su vida.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

54. “An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

55. “The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

56. “To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

57. “What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

58. “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.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

59. “Those who say they believe in God, and yet neither love nor fear him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them that God exists. Those who believe that they believe in God but without any passion in their heart, any anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-idea, not in God.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

60. “Consciousness is a disease.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

61. “And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

62. “I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

63. “We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

64. “Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself – that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks – he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech – this thing that they call a social product – was made for lying.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

65. “From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jeweled visions of our future.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

66. “There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

67. “For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

68. “Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

69. “Was man made for science, or was science made for man?”

— Miguel de Unamuno

70. “Man dies of cold, not of darkness.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

71. “El que crea se crea y el que se crea se muere.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

72. “And the secret of human life, the universal secret, the root secret from which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more life, the furious and insatiable desire to be everything else without ever ceasing to be ourselves, to take possession of the entire universe without letting the universe take possession of us and absorb us; it is the desire to be someone else without ceasing to be myself, and continue being myself at the same time I am someone else...”

— Miguel de Unamuno

73. “The will, the will not ever to die, the refusal to resign oneself to death, ceaselessly builds the house of life while the keen blasts and icy winds of reason unceasingly batter at the structure and beat it down.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

74. “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

75. “Fear is the start of wisdom.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

76. “Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

77. “Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

78. “While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

79. “Faith is, before all and above all, wishing God may exist.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

80. “The tears of anguish irritate and excite; but those of repentance are the ones that wash.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

81. “Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

82. “I cannot imagine how anyone can go through life without carrying the memories of his childhood on the surface of his soul.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

83. “Sow the living part of yourselves in the furrow of life.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

84. “Dream abides; it is the only things that abides; vision abides.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

85. “The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

86. “Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

87. “Those faults we do not have, do not bother us.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

88. “There are people who are so full of common sense that they haven’t the slightest cranny left for their own sense.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

89. “Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

90. “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.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

91. “The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

92. “The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

93. “The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

94. “Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

95. “And in touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a sorrowful love for yourself – a love that will consume your so-called self-love, which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation, the self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your soul.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

96. “These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

97. “Everything that exalts and expands consciousness is good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

98. “The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

99. “La vida es una nebulosa.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

100. “Philosophy fulfills the need to create for ourselves a single and complete concept of the world and of life.”

— Miguel de Unamuno