Miguel de Unamuno Quotes (199 quotes, page 4)

“In the root of the word "faith" itself… there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we perceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the person that gives us hope, that we believe, not directly or immediately in truth itself or in hope itself.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Fate , Truth , Faith , Hope

“What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills without its tedium, and without death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam… And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of the eternal recurrence which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Life , Death , Hunger , Soul

“There is nothing truly real, save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves and desires, save consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Love , God , Feeling , Thinking

“I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution — learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was the offering of the Middle Ages.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Age , Feeling , Soul , Learning

“There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Life , People , Soul , Thinking

“And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by him; loves Him and feels loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Love , God , Feeling , Soul

“Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the voice that assured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is that the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched thereby, that our souls may serve as a nutriment to the Universal soul.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Soul , Universe , Personality

“Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be pedantry of logic, or of esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Beauty , Feeling

“To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

“And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Love , World , Law , Feeling

“What the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of a thing, the effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being, self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy, although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, do not recognize it?”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Love , Knowledge , Effort

“Windelband, the historian of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (Was ist Philosophie? in the first volume of his Präludien) tells us that "the history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains an independent existence as a desire for knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval scholasticism upon which it endeavored to establish religious beliefs. But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this conflict?”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Life , World , Faith , Religion

“Perhaps there is nobody who would sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their religious faith. Indeed, it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a theoretical truth, the process in which the will merely sets in motion our faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will — it is a movement of the soul towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards something that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that makes us live.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Life , Truth , Faith , Soul

“It is the vital asserting itself, and in order to assert itself it creates, with the help of its enemy, the rational, a complete dogmatic structure, and this the Church defends against rationalism, against Protestantism, and against Modernism. The Church defends life. It stood up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did right, for Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal, created expressly to be eternalized. And lastly, Pius IX, the first Pontiff to be proclaimed infallible, declared he was irreconcilable with the so-called modern civilization. And he did right.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Life , Knowledge , Universe , Help

“The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which by the gradual elevation of the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification, answers merely to the feeling that God should be a perfect man, that God should include in his nature the feminine element. The progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety, having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, …has culminated in attributing to her the status of co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

God , Feeling , Nature , Time

“Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Knowledge

“Yes perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy of proving can be proven, nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge as the Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is another; and… perhaps there is an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Life , Knowledge , Sense

“When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depth of my spirit with the blood of divinity.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Life , Death , Angels , Feeling

“But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual leveling-down — or, we might say, its death — appears to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature? — for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at the expense of the other?”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Life , Death , Fate , World

“Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than skepticism, in the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the reasoning reason.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Sense

“I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to."”

Miguel de Unamuno book San Manuel Bueno, Mártir

San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (1933), Prologue

God

“I have told you that… we know nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save what we pity.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

Love , Way

“Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin? — for the damned sin without ceasing. This however is no solution to the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, and has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up.”

Miguel de Unamuno

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

People , World , Fear , Way

“But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual leveling-down — or, we might say, its death — appears to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature?”