# Quote — Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

> But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air on the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even if it did not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be directly aware of it, and above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and even though the idea of God does not enable us to explain either the existence or essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And the feeling, mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this — this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance... to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him.

- Author: [Miguel de Unamuno](https://www.leafyquotes.com/miguel-de-unamuno.md)
- Book: [Tragic Sense of Life](https://www.leafyquotes.com/miguel-de-unamuno/tragic-sense-of-life.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Unamuno#VIII_:_From_God_to_God) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/miguel-de-unamuno/tragic-sense-of-life/but-if-ether

## More from this book

> Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him not make the demand," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows!... And he wishes, unhappy man, to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he sinks into despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke — that intellectual Don Quixote who escaped from the cloister — and became an awakener of sleeping souls (dormitantium animorum excubitor), as the ex-Dominican said of himself — he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane (insano) not because they do not know, but because they over-know (soprasanno)."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/miguel-de-unamuno/tragic-sense-of-life/science-does-not.md)

> I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still playing, in some interval between acts, we shall meet again. And we shall recognize one another. And forgive me if I have troubled you more than was needful and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took up my pen proposing to distract you from your distractions. And may God deny you peace, but give you glory!

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/miguel-de-unamuno/tragic-sense-of-life/i-hope-reader.md)

> But our Don Quixote, the inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title of king for the inscription written over the cross.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/miguel-de-unamuno/tragic-sense-of-life/but-our-don.md)