Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

Coleridge cried; "O God, how glorious it is to live!" Renan asks, "O God, when will it be worth while to live?" In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

Man ought always to have something that he prefers to life; otherwise life itself will seem to him tiresome and void.

You don't even live once.

Surely there must be a better gift God could have given us than life?

We cannot reason ourselves into love, nor can we reason ourselves out of it, which suggests that love and reason have little to do with each other.

There is no greater monster than reason.

That is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.

It's strange. There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over, and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, but there's something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Teachings that defy reason defy reality; what defies reality defies life. Defying life is embracing death.

It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.

In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know.

Without the constantly living and articulated eperience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?

He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.

Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.

The absolute has moved into the fortress of the absurd.