Quotes from Miguel de Unamuno

Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent.

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

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!

No, no es que me miró, es que me envolvió en su mirada; y no es que creí en Dios, sino que me creí un dios