The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone
Context: It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune — that is to say, when they endeavor to persist in their own being — prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put it.
Miguel de Unamuno Quotes
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
Context: And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And he is in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself creating the longing for Himself.
“None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism
Context: ... as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out, that in France and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget skepticism in those who receive them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter — from seeking to believe with the reason and not with the life.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
Context: In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly — a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat, a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousness akin to our own, and a profound longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is his finality as we feel it.
“Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
Context: Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man. And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature — that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), II : The Starting-Point
Context: Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
Context: "God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal," wrote Kierkegaard (Afslutende uvidenskabelige Efterskrift); but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "God is great because his thought is action" (Ai giovani d'Italila), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is unthinkable by God. It is not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word — that is to say, with His thought — and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized?
“We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the grave.”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis
Context: We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the grave.... And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
Context: To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought, therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: "Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
Context: Consciousness (conscientia) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which a love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (1933), Prologue
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IX : Faith, Hope, and Charity
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution
“Love is a contradiction if there is no God.”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
Credo quia absurdam — I believe because it is absurd
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy
“Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints.”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
“Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.”
Fe que no duda es fe muerta.
La Agonía del Cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity) (1931)
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism
