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Miguel de Unamuno Quotes
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Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor of Greek and Classics, and later rector at the University of Salamanca.

His major philosophical essay was The Tragic Sense of Life , and his most famous novel was Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion , a modern exploration of the Cain and Abel story. Wikipedia  

✵ 29. September 1864 – 31. December 1936
Miguel de Unamuno photo
Miguel de Unamuno: 199 quotes11 likes

Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

“Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march and it time of war," says Robertson Smith in The Prophets of Israel, "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organization, centering in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as a host of Jehovah. the very name of Israel is martial, and means 'God (El) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwé Cebāôth — the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace."”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

“The devil is an angel too.”

Miguel de Unamuno

Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo [Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue] (1920); Two Mothers

“An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal ascent. If there is an end to all suffering, however pure and spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end to all desire, what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him? And if there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall they not fall asleep?”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity into a Quaternity. If… in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? …And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification with the Word.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

“The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness. For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality presupposing a purpose. And… faith in God is based simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it answer to a purpose. 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

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

“The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to accept it and accept it as it is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the "trap." But it has been said by Calderón that "to seek to persuade a man that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not console him for them, but it is another misfortune in addition." And furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de Estella said”

Miguel de Unamuno

Vanidad del Mundo, cap. xxi.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

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

Miguel de Unamuno

El use estropea y hasta destruye toda belleza. La función más noble de los objetos es la de ser contemplados.
Niebla [Mist] (1914)

“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

“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

“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

“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

“But Don Quixote was converted. Yes — and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us with his spirit — this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for the never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled. And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! [Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate: All hope abandon, ye who enter in] Do not destroy time!”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“For the mockers are those who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism

“And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to be all.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“I do not understand these men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason — I wish rather that there should be war between them.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss

“To say that everything is idea or that everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or spirit, just as my consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures forever.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.”

Miguel de Unamuno

Civilization is Civilism

“In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin, left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions. This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavor to explain — light, electricity, or universal gravitation — and only so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. In like manner the idea of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as it enables us to explain that which by means of it we endeavor to explain — the essence and existence of the Universe — and only so long as these cannot be explained in any other way. And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the idea of God, the supreme petitio principii, is valueless.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

“And the conversion of the other Don Quixote — he who was converted only to die — was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, and not his death or his conversion that immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for this crime of having been born. Felix culpa! And neither was his madness cured, but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“What objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For him who places himself outside of himself, none; but for him who lives and suffers and desires within himself — for him it is a question of life or death.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

“To know something is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it, to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself.”

Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss

“And if the immortality of the soul had been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die, we return to God, or more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were born, and if we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said to be merely atheism disguised; and in my opinion, undisguised.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“Uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable foundation, may be the basis of an ethic.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“…this visionary [ Emanuel Swedenborg in his book Heaven and Hell ] tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in human form, and in the virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one man.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit of the tragedy, the very heart of it — the sacrifice of our own individual consciousness upon the alter of the perfected Human Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness. But is there really a tragedy? …if we could succeed in understanding and feeling that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in surrendering ourselves to Him? Would the stream that flows into the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitterness of the salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its source? would it wish to return to the cloud which drew it life from the sea? is it not joy to feel itself absorbed?”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavor to to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavor to give consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious, that the Word may become life.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“And he arrives at the cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine had already anticipated… "I think therefore I am," can only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of "I am," which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is a knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek to join in wedlock life and reason!”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

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

Miguel de Unamuno

Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo [Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue] (1920); Two Mothers

“Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to eternalize himself because he was evil? May we say that it is not believing in the other life which causes a man to be good, but rather that being good causes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil? These states belong to the sphere of ethics, not of religion; or rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and the being good [forgivable] though doing evil, to religion?”

Miguel de Unamuno

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