174 Quotes by Miguel de Unamuno

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth’s sake! This is inhuman.

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. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech – this thing that they call a social product – was made for lying.

Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.

Is there anything more terrible than a “call”? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.

I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger.

My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I’m not selling bread; I’m selling yeast.

There are people who are so full of common sense that they haven’t the slightest cranny left for their own sense.

Science says: ‘We must live,’ and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: ‘We must die,’ and seeks how to make us die well.