Quotes from Miguel de Unamuno

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.

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.

While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.

Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity.

The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.

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.

Was man made for science, or was science made for man?

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man.

Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.

Dream abides; it is the only things that abides; vision abides.

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.

To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.

Cure yourself of the inclination to bother about how you look to other people. Be concerned only . . . with the idea God has of you.

May God deny you peace but give you glory!

What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before all and above all, wishing that God may exist.

Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.

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

The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.

The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present.

A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.

Your neighbor's vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.