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“The philosophy of the soul of my people appears to me as an expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of conflict between what the world is as scientific reason shows it to be and what we wish that it might be, as our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be found the explanation of what is usually said about us — namely, that we are fundamentally irreducible to Kultur — or in other words, that we refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to morality or ethics.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

“Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist — for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone

“Isolation is the worst possible counselor.”

Miguel de Unamuno

Civilization is Civilism

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

Miguel de Unamuno book San Manuel Bueno, Mártir

San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (1933), Prologue

“La verdadera ciencia enseña, por encima de todo, a dudar y a ser ignorante. (True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.)”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution

“Warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we are dying of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem

“"God is just and punishes us; that is all we need to know; as far as we are concerned the rest is merely curiosity." Such was the conclusion of Lamennais (Essai, etc., partie, chap. vii.), an opinion shared by many others. Calvin also held the same view. But is there anyone content with this? Pure curiosity! — to call this load that well nigh crushes our heart pure curiosity!”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis

“We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire consciousness of itself, to be itself — for to be oneself is to know oneself — to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at the same time that it remains a prisoner of it.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IX : Faith, Hope, and Charity

“The march, as ever, is toward the future, and he who marches is getting there, even though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the better way!…”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

“Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky.”

Miguel de Unamuno book San Manuel Bueno, Mártir

San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (1933), Prologue

“But our Don Quixote, the inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title of king for the inscription written over the cross.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

“Little can be hoped for from a ruler… who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone

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

Miguel de Unamuno

Fanatical Skepticism

“And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that the consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it. Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and have our being.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity

“Rousseau has said in his Emile (book iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports it because it is his. …The essential thing is to think differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists he is a believer."”

Miguel de Unamuno

How much substantial truth there is in these gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality

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

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution
Context: To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if he existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action.
Context: To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if he existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.

“It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions, and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an animal that guards its dead.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality

“Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe, like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a hole and enclosing it with steel.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone

“Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the inquiry into the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore," the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), II : The Starting-Point

“Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do His will — the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself" (John vii. 17); and there is a well known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the proof by keeping its precepts and commandments”

Miguel de Unamuno

Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, book viii., 43
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem