Miguel de Unamuno Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.

My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live.

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

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

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

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

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.

The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity.

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

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.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

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

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.

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

May God deny you peace but give you glory!

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

Cure yourself of the inclination to bother about how you look to other people. Be concerned only . . . with the idea God has of you.

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

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

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.

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.