Miguel de Unamuno

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.

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

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.

To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.

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.

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant.

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.

A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.

If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory.

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.

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.

We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.

Consciousness is a disease.

It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.

Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

It is truer to say that martyrs create faith more than faith creates martyrs.

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.

Your neighbor’s vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.