Miguel de Unamuno, in full Miguel De Unamuno Y Jugo, (born September 29, 1864, Bilbao, Spain – died December 31, 1936, Salamanca, Spain) was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, and educator.
Unamuno’s notable works include the novels Love and Pedagogy (Amor y pedagogía, 1902), Mist (Niebla, 1914), Aunt Tula (La tía Tula, 1921), Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr (San Manuel Bueno, mártir, 1930), and the poem The Christ of Velázquez (El Cristo de Velázquez, 1920). His most famous novel is Abel Sánchez (Abel Sánchez: Una historia de passion, 1917), a modern re-creation of the Cain and Abel story.
Unamuno’s greatest philosophical work is The Tragic Sense of Life (Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, 1912).
Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep VII. Love, Suffering, Pity, and Personality, page 133
Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep X. Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis, page 256
Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.Poems (Poesías) (1907), Psalm II (Salmo II), page 113
Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep XI. The Practical Problem, page 269
What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep XI. The Practical Problem, page 261
We should pay more attention to being fathers of our future than to being sons of our past.Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno, Volume 3: Our Lord Don Quixote (1914)(ed. 1967), page 99
And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of life.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep V. The Rationalist Dissolution, page 90
Until one cries real tears one never knows whether one has a soul or not.Mist (1914), Section II. Fictional Beings in theri own reality
It is truer to say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes martyrs.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep IX. Faith, Hope, and Charity, page 191
Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.Essays and Soliloquies (ed. 1925), Chapter 13. Solitude, page 164
The intellectual world is divided into two classes – dilettanti on the one hand, and pedants on the other.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chapter XI. The Practical Problem, page 267
We die of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night kills, but the frost.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Conclusion. Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy, page 327
To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep IX. Faith, Hope, and Charity, page 206
The dream of one person alone is an illusion – a mere appearance; the dream of two persons is truth, reality. What is the real world but the dream that we all dream, the common dream?Mist (1914), Section II. Fictional Beings in theri own reality
While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep II. The Starting-Point, page 23
The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Conclusion. Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy, page 315
True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes that it does not know. It requires a solution.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep V. The Rationalist Dissolution, page 93
It is not the great pains, nor the great joys, to which we succumb; and this is because the great pains and the great joys come wrapped in an immense mist of trifling incidents. And life is just this – mist. Life is a nebula.Mist (1914), Section I. The protagonist in its textual reality
To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chapter VII. Love, Suffering, Pity, and Personality, page 136
Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.Essays and Soliloquies (ed. 1925), Chapter 6. The Helmet of Mambrino, page 105
Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chapter IX. Faith, Hope, and Charity, page 201
We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for us to magnify all of our sensations and impressions… perhaps so that we could believe in them.Mist (1914), Section II. Fictional Beings in theri own reality
Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep IX. Faith, Hope, and Charity, page 205
To understand is to forgive, they say. No, to forgive is to understand. First comes love and then understanding.Mist (1914), Section I. The protagonist in its textual reality
There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912) (ed. 1921), Chapter III. The Hunger of Immortality, page 45
Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself… that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks… he lies to himself.Mist (1914), Section II. Fictional Beings in theri own reality
Happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned about or defined.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chapter V. The Rationalist Dissolution, page 100
Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.Civilization is Civilism (La civilización es civismo) (April 1907)
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or our pessimism that makes our ideas.The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)(ed. 1921), Chaptep I. The Man of Flesh and Bone, page 3