Quotes from Miguel de Unamuno

My religion is searching for the truth in life and life in the truth, though knowing that I do not have to find it while I live; my religion is fighting incessantly and tirelessly with the unknown.

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is inhuman.

Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.

There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.

It is truer to say that martyrs create faith more than faith creates martyrs.

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

Science says: "We must live," and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable; wisdom says: "We must die," and seeks how to make us die well.

What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.

They will conquer but they will not convince.

There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.

Men shout to avoid listening to one another.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though live ideas are born out of it. Worms, also, feed upon corpses.

We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.

My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.

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

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

Piensa el sentimiento, siente el pensamiento." (roughly translated, "Think about the emotional and feel the intellectual")

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.

Hell has been conceived as a police institution, to inspire fear in this world. But the worst of it all is that it no longer frightens anyone, and therefore it will have to be closed down.

Fear is the start of wisdom.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas