Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

Men shout to avoid listening to one another.

"Piensa el sentimiento, siente el pensamiento."

(roughly translated, "Think about the emotional and feel the intellectual")

If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.

And the secret of human life, the universal secret, the root secret from which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more life, the furious and insatiable desire to be everything else without ever ceasing to be ourselves, to take possession of the entire universe without letting the universe take possession of us and absorb us; it is the desire to be someone else without ceasing to be myself, and continue being myself at the same time I am someone else...

We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions — perhaps so that we could believe in them.

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.

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

A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what they're talking about.

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.

The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.

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?

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.

No os quepais en el cerebro lo que os puede caber en el bolsillo. Y al contrario, ¡no os quepais en el bolsillo lo que os puede caber en el cerebro!

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

el que viaja mucho va huyendo de cada lugar que deja y no buscando cada lugar a que llega.