Zitate von Miguel de Unamuno

„Das Volk glaubt nämlich nicht an sich selbst. Und Gott schweigt. Hierin liegt der Grund der universellen Tragödie: Gott schweigt. Und er schweigt, weil er Atheist ist.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

Wie man einen Roman macht. Aus dem Spanischen übersetzt von Erna Pfeiffer, Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien, 2000, ISBN 3-85420-543-0, S. 71

„Das Vollendete, das Perfekte, ist der Tod, und das Leben kann nicht sterben.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

Wie man einen Roman macht. Aus dem Spanischen übersetzt von Erna Pfeiffer, Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien, 2000, ISBN 3-85420-543-0, S. 96

„Der Mensch arbeitet, um Arbeit zu vermeiden, er arbeitet, um nicht zu arbeiten. Es ist unglaublich, welche Arbeiten der Mensch auf sich nimmt, nur um nicht arbeiten zu müssen.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

Plädoyer des Müßiggangs. Ausgewählt und aus dem Spanischen übersetzt von Erna Pfeiffer, Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien, 2. Auflage 1996, S. 21 ISBN 3-85420-442-6

„Der Verstand einigt uns und die Wahrheiten trennen uns.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

Wie man einen Roman macht. Aus dem Spanischen übersetzt von Erna Pfeiffer, Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien, 2000, ISBN 3-85420-543-0, S. 65

„Ein Problem setzt nicht so sehr eine Lösung voraus, im analytischen oder auflösenden Sinne, als vielmehr eine Konstruktion, eine Kreation. Es löst sich im Tun.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

Wie man einen Roman macht. Aus dem Spanischen übersetzt von Erna Pfeiffer, Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien, 2000, ISBN 3-85420-543-0, S. 114

„In einem Volk, bei dem viel gearbeitet wird, ist die Arbeit meist schlecht verteilt; dort gibt es mehr Leute, die viel arbeiten, damit die anderen faulenzen können.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

Plädoyer des Müßiggangs. Ausgewählt und aus dem Spanischen übersetzt von Erna Pfeiffer, Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien, 2. Auflage 1996, ISBN 3-85420-442-6, S. 18

„Ist der Weg nicht schon Heimat?“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

Wie man einen Roman macht. Aus dem Spanischen übersetzt von Erna Pfeiffer, Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien, 2000, ISBN 3-85420-543-0, S. 127

„Und wenn die Geschichte nichts als das Lachen Gottes wäre? Jede Revolution eine seiner Lachsalven?“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

Wie man einen Roman macht. Aus dem Spanischen übersetzt von Erna Pfeiffer, Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien, 2000, ISBN 3-85420-543-0, S. 97

„Die Wissenschaft ist ein Kirchhof abgestorbener Ideen, wenn sie auch Leben spendet.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida

Das Tragische Lebensgefühl. Deutsch von Robert Friese. München: Meyer & Jessen 1925, S. 116. Oft verkürzt zu: "Die Wissenschaft ist ein Friedhof toter Ideen."
Original spanisch: "La ciencia es un cementerio de ideas muertas, aunque de ellas salga vida." - Del sentimiento trágico de la vida. Renacimiento, 1913, p. 92 books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=Pxg2AQAAMAAJ&q=cementerio

„It is sad not to be loved, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

To a Young Writer

„Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

„The truth is sum, ergo cogito — I am, therefore I think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all consciousness of being?“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), II : The Starting-Point
Kontext: The truth is sum, ergo cogito — I am, therefore I think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without feeling, without that species of materiality which feelings lends to it? Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove [Descartes] have said: "I feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself, is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable?

„The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
Kontext: In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly — a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat, a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousness akin to our own, and a profound longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is his finality as we feel it.

„Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
Kontext: Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man. And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature — that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.

„Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), II : The Starting-Point
Kontext: Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.

„To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
Kontext: To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought, therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: "Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.

„May not the absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would die if it were realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope? And there is no place for hope once possession has been realized, for hope, desire, is killed by possession.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis
Kontext: May not the absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would die if it were realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope? And there is no place for hope once possession has been realized, for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others, but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth, whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?

„And through this despair he reaches the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke — that intellectual Don Quixote who escaped from the cloister — and became an awakener of sleeping souls (dormitantium animorum excubitor), as the ex-Dominican said of himself — he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane (insano) not because they do not know, but because they over-know (soprasanno)."“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy
Kontext: Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him not make the demand," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows!... And he wishes, unhappy man, to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he sinks into despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke — that intellectual Don Quixote who escaped from the cloister — and became an awakener of sleeping souls (dormitantium animorum excubitor), as the ex-Dominican said of himself — he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane (insano) not because they do not know, but because they over-know (soprasanno)."

„My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung from a multitude of ancestors.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
Kontext: Not only are we unable to conceive of the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I, an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung from a multitude of ancestors. I carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me, potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I to the infinite — or rather I, the projection of God to the finite — must also be a multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God — that is to say, in order to save the living God — faith's need — the need of the feeling and the imagination — of conceiving Him and feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.