A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.
Miguel De UnamunoRead
At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right
Interpretation
What this quote means
Silence can be deceptive, and true persuasion requires reason and morality, not just power.
This quote emphasizes the importance of honesty and the role of reason in effective communication. While brute force or silence might lead to temporary victories, true persuasion and convincing others require a foundation of reason and ethical consideration, which the speaker suggests is often lacking in forceful arguments.
Themes
SilencePersuasionReasonTruthPower
In practice
Example use cases
During a public debate about ethics, you might cite this quote to emphasize the importance of reasoning over mere force.
More from Miguel De Unamuno
All quotes →Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.
Miguel De UnamunoRead
Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.
Miguel De UnamunoRead
Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
Miguel De UnamunoRead
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.
Miguel De UnamunoRead
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.
Miguel De UnamunoRead
Similar quotes
The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom - voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.
Mikhail BakuninRead
When I grew up in the South, I was taught that segregation was the will of God, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that women were by nature in inferior to men, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that it was okay to hate other religions, and especially the Jews, and the Bible was quoted to prove it.
John Shelby SpongRead
The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life.
Virginia WoolfRead
The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.
Albert CamusRead
Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.
Stephen KingRead
The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,—not the material of my every-day existence--but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.
Edgar Allan PoeRead