Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Miguel de Unamuno (Spanish Philosopher, Writer)

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864–1936) was a Spanish poet, a man of letters, and philosopher. His writings—which spanned mystic philosophy, historical studies, essays, books on travel, and austere poetry—related to the meaning of life and death.

Born in Bilbao, Unamuno was educated at the Instituto Vizcaino of Bilbao and the University of Madrid. He worked as a professor of Greek philology at Salamanca 1891–1936, but was exiled to the island of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands 1924–30 when, as a Republican, he opposed General Miguel Primo de Rivera during Spain’s Restoration era.

Unamuno also wrote poetry and plays; but he was most influential as an essayist and novelist. Among his most famous works are Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905; Our Lord Don Quixote, 1927,) his novel Niebla (1914; Mist, 1928,) Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1913; The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples, 1926) and a volume of religious poetry, El Cristo de Velázquez (1920; The Christ of Velázquez, 1951.)

Unamuno’s best-known plays are Sombras de sueño (1930; Dream Shadows,) Abel Sánchez (1917; a modern version of the biblical story of Cain and Abel,) and El hermano Juan (1929; Brother Juan.)

As a philosopher, Unamuno was the earliest 20th-century thinker to arrive at a point of view on man and the world that can be described as an early existentialist. Influenced by William James and Søren Kierkegaard, he developed an existentialist Christian theology, premised on a tragic view of life and mortality. His viewpoints were developed mostly in his fiction; Del sentimiento trágico de la vida was his most important philosophical text.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Miguel de Unamuno

To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Sympathy

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Despair

A lack of simplicity ruins it all.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Simplicity

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.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Acceptance

Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Vanity

We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Success

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Doubt, Faith, Belief

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.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: God

That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.
Miguel de Unamuno

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Habits, Habit

The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.
Miguel de Unamuno

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Love

If a man never contradicts himself, it is because he never says anything.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Truth

A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Arguments, Argument

To believe in God is to yearn for His existence, and furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Faith, Belief

Fear is the start of wisdom.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Anxiety, Fear

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.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Skepticism, Doubt

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid—in which case all comment is superfluous—or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Argument

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Solitude

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Scientists, Science

At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right.
Miguel de Unamuno

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.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Suffering

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Doubt

Only in solitude do we raise our hearts to the Heart of the Universe
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Solitude

Your neighbor’s vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Tolerance

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Heroism

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Personality

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Achieving, Accomplishment, Reality

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Love

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.
Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Thought

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