Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

Serenado um pouco, abriu o livro e retomou a leitura. Esqueceu-se de si próprio por completo e bem podia então dizer que morrera. Sonhava no outro, ou melhor, o outro era um sonho que nele se sonhava, uma criatura da sua infinita solidão. Até que despertou com uma terrível pontada no peito. A personagem do livro acabara de lhe dizer de novo: «Devo repetir ao leitor que comigo morrerá.». E desta vez o efeito foi espantoso. O trágico leitor perdeu o conhecimento naquele seu leito de sofrimento espiritual; deixou de sonhar no outro e deixou de sonhar-se a si mesmo. E quando voltou a si, lançou fora o livro, apagou a luz e procurou adormecer, deixar de sonhar. Impossível! De quando em quando tinha de levantar-se para beber água; ocorreu-lhe que bebia no Sena, no espelho. «Estarei louco? - repetia -. Certamente que não, porque quando uma pessoa se pergunta se está louca é porque não está...». Levantou-se, pegou-lhe o fogo na lareira e queimou o livro, voltando em seguida a deitar-se. E conseguiu finalmente adormecer.

— Él me hizo un hombre nuevo, un verdadero Lázaro, un resucitado — me decía — . Él me dio fe. — ¿Fe? — le interrumpía yo. — Sí, fe, fe en el consuelo de la vida, fe en el contento de la vida. Él me curó de mi progresismo. Porque hay, Ángela, dos clases de hombres peligrosos y nocivos: los que convencidos de la vida de ultratumba, de la resurrección de la carne, atormentan, como inquisidores que son, a los demás para que, despreciando esta vida como transitoria, se ganen la otra, y los que no creyendo más que en este... — Como acaso tú... — le decía yo. — Y sí, y como Don Manuel. Pero no creyendo más que en este mundo, esperan no sé qué sociedad futura, y se esfuerzan en negarle al pueblo el consuelo de creer en otro...

And usually [the philosopher] philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.

«La caridad encubre todos los pecados», decía san Pedro.

I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still playing, in some interval between acts, we shall meet again. And we shall recognize one another. And forgive me if I have troubled you more than was needful and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took up my pen proposing to distract you from your distractions. And may God deny you peace, but give you glory!

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

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 intellectual world is divided into two classes — dilettantes, on the one hand, and pedants, on the other.

This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.

Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.

La vida es una nebulosa.

El amor precede al conocimiento, y éste mata a aquél.

Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophical basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. … the attacks which are directed against religion from a presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks from another but opposing religious point of view.

Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying.

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?