Miguel de Unamuno

Quotes

1. When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depth of my spirit with the blood of divinity.

2. 

   I am dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle.

3. 

   The wretched consciousness shrinks from it own annihilation, and just as an animal spirit newly severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs desire to possess another life than that of the world itself.

4. 

   For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the justification a posteriori of our conduct, or else they are our way of trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.

5. 

   To know something is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it, to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself.

6. 

   The real sin — perhaps it is a sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission — is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal — that is, a heretic — is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.

7. 

   I am the center of my universe, the center of the universe, and in my supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!" What is a man profited if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul? (Matt. xvi. 26).

8. 

   And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law.

9. 

   Glorious is the risk! — καλος γαρ ο κινδυνος, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying … Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression on me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die — no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live — this poor "I" that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.

10. 

    The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not.

11. 

    ...as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out, that in France and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget skepticism in those who receive them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter — from seeking to believe with the reason and not with the life.

12. 

    Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.