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Argument & Debate
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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.
-Miguel de Unamuno, in a confrontation with fascist General Milan-Astray, at the University of Salamanca
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When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid -- in which case all comment is superfluous -- or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Despair
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Man dies of cold, not of darkness.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Doubt
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Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Fascism
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That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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God
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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.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Habits
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To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Love
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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
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Personality
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Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.
-Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 1913
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Science
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Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Solitude
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Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
-Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies, 1924
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Suffering
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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.
-Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life ch. 9, 1913
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Sympathy
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To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Thought
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The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Tolerance
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Your neighbor's vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Vanity
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Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.
-Miguel de Unamuno
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Books by and about Miguel de Unamuno
