Tragic Sense of Life Quotes

“Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly — but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“Warmth, warmth, more warmth! For we are dying of cold and not darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist — for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“And usually [the philosopher] philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“Consciousness (conscientia) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which a love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, ‘Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?’ And the sage answered him, ‘Precisely for that reason—because it does not avail.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us to no other happiness than that of love itself and its tragic consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. We are the more—that is the more divine—the greater our capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“And in touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a sorrowful love for yourself--a love that will consume your so-called self-love, which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation, the self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your soul.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“To say that everything is idea or that everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or spirit, just as my consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures forever.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy. The consciousness that everything passes away, that we ourselves pass away, and that everything that is ours and everything that environs us passes away, fills us with anguish, and this anguish itself reveals to us the consolation of that which does not pass away, of the eternal, of the beautiful.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“¿Que sueño...? Dejadme soñar; si ese sueño es mi vida, no me despertéis de él. Creo”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida

“I will not resign from life; I must be dismissed.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic sense of life

“Obermann: «Para el Universo, nada; para mí, todo»;”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (El libro de bolsillo - Bibliotecas de autor - Biblioteca Unamuno)

“I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“en el fondo del abismo se encuentran la desesperación sentimental y volitiva y el escepticismo ra cional frente a frente, y se abrazan como hermanos. Y”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida

“El hombre es un fin, no un medio. La civilización toda se endereza al hombre, a cada hombre, a cada yo. ¿O qué es ese ídolo, llámese Humanidad o como se llamare, a que se han de sacrificar todos y cada uno de los hombres? Porque”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida

“Contra las acusaciones de egocentrismo, se defendió diciendo que lo que él quería no era ni más ni menos que lo anhelado por todos: “¿Egoísmo, decís? Nada hay más universal que lo individual, pues lo que es de cada uno lo es de todos”.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations Paperback – June 21, 1978

“(to enjoy the flesh of one's own soul).”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic sense of life

“«Parece difícil probar con la mera luz de la razón la inmortalidad del alma. Los argumentos en favor de ella se derivan comúnmente de tópicos metafísicos, morales o físicos. Pero es en realidad el Evangelio, y sólo el Evangelio, el que ha traído a luz la vida y la inmortalidad».”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (El libro de bolsillo - Bibliotecas de autor - Biblioteca Unamuno)

“Y «¿quién eres tú?» –me preguntas–, y con Obermann te contesto: «¡Para el universo, nada; para mí, todo!».”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (El libro de bolsillo - Bibliotecas de autor - Biblioteca Unamuno)

“«Sufro yo a tu costa / Dios no existente, pues si Tú existieras / existiría yo también de veras».”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (El libro de bolsillo - Bibliotecas de autor - Biblioteca Unamuno)

“Ni el sentimiento logra hacer del consuelo verdad, ni la razón logra hacer de la verdad consuelo; pero esta segunda, la razón, procediendo sobre la verdad misma, sobre el concepto mismo de realidad, logra hundirse en un profundo escepticismo.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida

“sí, hijo mío, no puedes probar que yo, que contigo hablo, no eres tú que hablas contigo mismo, porque nada digno de probarse puede ser probado ni des-probado, por lo cual sé prudente, agárrate siempre a la parte más soleada de la duda y trepa a la Fe allende las formas de la Fe!». Sí, acaso, como dice el sabio, nada digno de probarse puede ser probado ni des-probado, for nothing worthy proving can be proven, nor yet disproven; pero ¿podemos contener a ese instinto que lleva al hombre a querer conocer y sobre”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (El libro de bolsillo - Bibliotecas de autor - Biblioteca Unamuno)

“fue quien escribió aquellas inmortales palabras: «Si se predica que Cristo resucitó de los muertos, ¿cómo dicen algunos entre vosotros que no hay resurrección de muertos? Porque si no hay resurrección de muertos, tampoco Cristo resucitó, y si Cristo no resucitó, vana es nuestra predicación y vuestra fe es vana... Entonces los que durmieron en Cristo, se pierden. Si en esta vida sólo esperamos en Cristo, somos los más miserables de los hombres» (I Cor.,”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (El libro de bolsillo - Bibliotecas de autor - Biblioteca Unamuno)

“Así, cada uno por su lado, judíos y griegos llegaron al verdadero descubrimiento de la muerte, que es el que hace entrar a los pueblos, como a los hombres, en la pubertad espiritual, la del sentimiento trágico de la vida, que es cuando engendra la Humanidad al Dios vivo.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (El libro de bolsillo - Bibliotecas de autor - Biblioteca Unamuno)