Miguel De Unamuno

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

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

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.

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

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

Spiritual Love is born of sorrow. . . . For men love one another with spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground buried beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they know one another and feel one another and feel with one another in their common anguish, and so they pity one another and love one another.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

What is vanity but the longing to survive?

Everything that exalts and expands consciousness is good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.

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

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.

Cure yourself of the inclination to bother about how you look to other people. Be concerned only . . . with the idea God has of you.

My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.

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