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Unamuno Quotes

Browse 6 quotes about Unamuno.

Unamuno Quotes

“And the end of life is to fashion a soul, an immortal soul; a soul of one's own making. Because at the hour of death one bequeaths a skeleton to the earth, but a soul, a piece of work, to history. Or such is the case when one has lived, that is, when one has wrestled with the life that passes, wrestled it for the prize of the life that remains. And life, what is life? Even more tragic, what is truth?”

“I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son. What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap?”