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
Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Achieving, Reality, Accomplishment
Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Doubt
Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Love
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
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
A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Arguments, Argument
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
Your neighbor’s vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Tolerance
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
The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Thought
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
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
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
Fear is the start of wisdom.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
A lack of simplicity ruins it all.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Simplicity
Man dies of cold, not of darkness.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Despair
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
Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Scientists, Science
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
If a man never contradicts himself, it is because he never says anything.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Truth
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
Only in solitude do we raise our hearts to the Heart of the Universe
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Solitude
To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Habits, Habit
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: Belief, Faith
The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Faith, Belief, Doubt
If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.
—Miguel de Unamuno
That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.
—Miguel de Unamuno
To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Topics: Sympathy
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