# Quote — Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

> Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin? — for the damned sin without ceasing. This however is no solution to the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, and has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up.

- 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#X_:_Religion,_the_Mythology_of_the_Beyond_and_the_Apocatastasis) ([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/shall-we-not

## 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)