Miguel de Unamuno
Dream abides; it is the only things that abides; vision abides.Collection: Dream
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 depthCollection: Love
My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.Collection: Writing
Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.Collection: Chemistry
Isolation is the worst possible counselor.Collection: Isolation
While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.Collection: Truth
He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Optimistic
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?Collection: Men
The devil is an angel too.Collection: Angel
And usually [the philosopher] philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Wind
The truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.Collection: War
What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before all and above all, wishing that God may exist.Collection: Faith
Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.Collection: God
Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.Collection: Use
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.Collection: Two
The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.Collection: History
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.Collection: Knowledge
And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.Collection: Time
Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.Collection: May
Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.Collection: Life
These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.Collection: Science
The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.Collection: Enemy
The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.Collection: Men
The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present.Collection: Home
From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jeweled visions of our future.Collection: Memories
Sow the living part of yourselves in the furrow of life.Collection: Cutting
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.Collection: Inspire
Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Life
Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Science
What is vanity but the longing to survive?Collection: Vanity
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.Collection: Death
Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.Collection: School
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.Collection: Spiritual
Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.Collection: Soul
Was man made for science, or was science made for man?Collection: Men
An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.Collection: Ideas
I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible 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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Fall
Everything that exalts and expands consciousness is good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.Collection: Depressing
It is not the shilling I give you that counts, but the warmth that it carries with it from my hand.Collection: Hands
None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.Collection: Believe
The tears of anguish irritate and excite; but those of repentance are the ones that wash.Collection: Tears
The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity.Collection: Doubt