Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

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

Miremos más que somos padres de nuestro porvenir que no hijos de nuestro pasado

Eso de amor -decíase Ramiro ahora- sabe a libro; sólo en el teatro y en las novelas se oye el yo te amo; en la vida de la carne y sangre y hueso el entrañable ¡te quiero! y el más entrañable aún callárselo.

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 most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?

¡Qué ganas tengo de dormir, dormir, dormir sin fin, dormir por toda una eternidad y sin soñar!, ¡olvidando el sueño! Cuando me entierren, que sea en una caja hecha con aquellas seis tablas que tallé del viejo nogal, ¡pobrecito!, a cuya sombra jugué de niño, cuando empezaba a soñar… ¡Y entonces sí que creía en la vida perdurable! Es decir, me figuro ahora que creía entonces. Para un niño creer no es más que soñar.

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.

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.

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.

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.

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.