Miguel de Unamuno

“ Solitude unites us, believe me, just as much as society separates us. And if we do not know how to love one another, it is because we do not know how to be alone.
It is only in solitude, when it has broken the thick crust of shame that separates us from one another and separates us all from God, that we have no secrets from God; only in solitude do we raise our heart to the Heart of the Universe; only in solitude does the redeeming hymn of supreme confession issue from our soul. ”

“ THE TOWER OF MONTERREY
It is freezing. A biting north wind cuts short the breath. From the steely blue a pale sun sheds a glittering light that cuts out the shadows and models the landscape into a kind of architectural relief.
For this crystal-clear light, bright as frost, without haze, appears not so much to illumine as to civilize Nature; it makes it civil, which means that it makes it more than human. To humanize is much, but to civilize is more. To civilize, to make civil—or, if you like, to citizenize—is to superhumanize. Humanity seems to us, so far as man is concerned, to be everything ”

“ If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything rather than a philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant, that is to say, a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any science—of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of philology—may be, though within very narrow limits and restrictions, a work of differentiated specialization; but philosophy, like poetry, is either a work of integration and harmony or else it is mere philosophism, pseudo-philosophical erudition.
All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowing for the sake of knowing is, say what you will, nothing but a solemn begging of the question. ”

“ I suppose you will grant this same helmet to be a basin?” “He that dares grant any such thing,” said Don Quixote, “must know that he lies plainly, if he is a knight; but, if a squire, he lies abominably.”
That’s right, my lord Don Quixote, that’s right. It is courage, it is the barefaced courage that is ready to affirm a thing aloud and before all the world and to defend the affirmation of it to the death, it is courage that creates all truths. Things are so much the truer the more they are believed, and it is not intelligence but will that imposes them upon the world. ”

“ I have never felt any desire to move a crowd, to exercise influence upon a mass of people—who lose their personality in being massed together—and on the other hand I have always felt a furious desire to perturb the heart of each individual man, to exercise an influence upon each one of my brothers in humanity. Whenever I have spoken in public I have almost always succeeded in employing a kind of lyrical oratory, and I have endeavoured to force upon myself the illusion that I was speaking to only one of my hearers, to any one, no matter which, to each one, not to all of them en masse. ”

“ And this my tower of Monterrey speaks to me of our Renaissance, of the Spanish renaissance, of the eternal essence of Spain, and tells me to say my Spanish self and to affirm that if life is dream, dream is the only thing that abides, and that the rest, all that is not dream, is nothing but a process of digestion that passes away, as sorrow and joy, hate and love, memory and hope, pass away. Yes, life without dream is nothing but digestion and respiration, breath that vanishes. ”

“ And he who does not hear the celestial song must not go in quest of the sepulchre of the Knight.
They will talk to you, these poet-dancers. Pay no heed to them. He who begins to play his Pan-pipes beneath the sky of heaven and does not hear the music of the spheres, does not deserve to hear it. He does not know the abyss-deep depths of the poetry of fanaticism, he does not know the infinite poetry of empty temples, without lights, without ornament, without images, without pomps, without incense, without anything of what is called art. ”

“ No, you are not European, not what is called European; no, you are not modern, not what is called modern. And I ask myself again: Is the fact that you feel that you are neither European nor modern due to the fact that you are a Spaniard? Are we Spaniards, at heart, irreducible to Europeanization and modernization? And if that be the case, is there no salvation for us? Is there no other life than modern and European life? Is there no other culture—or whatever you like to call it? ”

“ Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does not allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it is not given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, which the will itself cannot master. ”

“ When you force me to speak of these things, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my heart, sick with the atmosphere of conventionality that harasses and oppresses me on all sides, sick with the slime of the slough of falsehood in which we are mired, sick with scrabbling cowardice which shows itself on every hand, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my sick heart visions without reason, concepts without logic, things of which I know not the meaning and whose meaning I do not wish to try to fathom. ”

“ You are consumed, my friend, with a perpetual fever, with a thirst for unfathomable, shoreless oceans, with a hunger for universes, with a home-sickness for eternity. Reason is suffering to you. And you don’t know what you want. And now, now you want to go to the sepulchre of the Knight of Folly and there dissolve yourself in tears, consume yourself in fever, die of your thirst for oceans, of your hunger for universes, of your home-sickness for eternity. ”

“ This theory, or rather this sense, of the uniqueness of personality may serve as the basis for an ethic. “Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact—that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable—a practical truth.” The whole duty of man is to discover himself, to discover his own reality, to discover what is unique in himself, to bring it to the light, not to shrink from exposing it, to express it in action and to impose it upon the world. The courage of self-affirmation is the virtue which Unamuno exhorts his fellow-countrymen to achieve. ”

“ I myself am not convinced that there is; but I cannot conceive that a man, a true man, should not merely resign himself to the enjoyment of this life only, but that he should renounce and even spurn another life. And as for this idea that we shall continue to live in our works, in our children, in the memory of other generations, and that everything renews and transforms itself, and that we shall help to build up a more perfect society—all this appears to me to be the most miserable subterfuge for escaping the depths of despair. ”

“ And to the soul that beholds you, tower of Monterrey, you say that he says the utmost that can be said who says himself, who expresses his person, who strips his spirit naked in the icy-clear light of the civil world, standing statue-like before the world of men. The greatest thing that men can see is another man, and if they but once saw him utterly and completely, they would carry him with them for ever. ”

“ Yes, there is no doubt about it—this insane eagerness to know what those round about us are saying or repeating hinders us from following the progress of the human soul as it reveals itself in its immortal sons, those erect pillars that are landmarks for all time. What does it matter to you, tell me, what your neighbour is clamouring about? You are not going to follow the example of those whose time and soul are so absorbed in listening to all the superficialities of their contemporaries that they have no time left to enjoy the enduring legacy of humanity. ”

“ Nature does not here recreate the spirit. Rather it detaches us from the low earth and enfolds us in the pure naked unvarying sky. Here there is no communion with nature, no absorption in her exuberant splendours. This infinite landscape is, if it may be so said, nonotheistic rather than pantheistic. Man is not lost in it so much as diminished by it, and in its immense drought he is made aware of the aridity of his own soul. ”

“ Love can live upon memories and hopes; hate needs present realities.
Let me, then, fly from society and take refuge in the quiet of the country, seeking in the heart of it and within my own soul the company of people.
Men only feel themselves really brothers when they hear one another in the silence of things in the midst of solitude. The hushed moan of your neighbour which reaches you through the wall that separates you penetrates much more deeply into your heart than would all his laments if he told you them to your face. ”

“ What I fly from, I repeat, as from the plague, is any kind of classification of myself, and when I die I hope I shall still hear these intellectual sluggards inquiring: “And this gentleman, what is he?” Liberal or progressive fools will take me for a reactionary and perhaps for a mystic, without understanding of course what they may mean; and conservative and reactionary fools will take me for a kind of spiritual anarchist; and both of them will pity me as an unfortunate gentleman anxious to distinguish himself by singularity, hoping to be reputed an original, and with a bonnet full of bees. ”

“ Do you not know what it is to guard the sacred fire of life, fanning it to ever brighter flame in simple and silent worship? Love, the simple act of loving, without deeds, is itself a heroic deed. Come and renounce all your deeds in my arms—the dim obscurity of your repose in my arms will be a seed-time which will bear fruit in the deeds and glory of others to whom your very name will be unknown. When even the echo of your name is no longer borne upon the air, when there is no longer any air to bear the echo of it, the embers of your love will warm the ruins of perished worlds. ”

“ Antipathy—now for a paradox!—is a form of sympathy. Reading me for the sake of being annoyed and quarrelling with what I say or my way of saying it, is the same as reading me and agreeing with what I say. To combat a man is one way of animating and confirming him.
I have put warmth and life into my books and it is for the sake of the warmth and life I have put into them that you read them. I have put passion into my books. Passion of hate, passion of disdain, passion of contempt very often—I don’t deny it. ”

“ In such a life a hedgehog would end by becoming a lamb, its quills would turn into softest fleece, and for my part I would rather be a hedgehog than a lamb.
I understand why Willoughby fled from London as from the burial-place of the individual man. Is it not a terrible thing to walk through two or three miles of city streets and pass two or three thousand people without meeting a single known face to set a spark to a train of human thought? A glance of hate from a known enemy is sweeter than a glance of indifference, if not of disdain, from an unknown stranger. ”

“ The all is the past that is condensed in the present; the more than all is the eternity that embraces the past, the present and the future. The all is the universe and the more than all is thought. For thought exceeds all that has been thought and all that is thinkable and goes beyond them.
The city also is Nature. Its streets and its squares and its erect pillared towers also are landscape. ”

“ And I shall spend my life wrestling with mystery, and even without hope of penetrating it, for this wrestling is my sustenance and my consolation. Yes, my consolation. I have accustomed myself to wrest hope from despair itself. And let not fools in their superficiality shriek: Paradox!
I cannot conceive of a man of culture without this preoccupation, and in point of culture—and culture is not the same as civilization—I can hope but little from those who live without interest in the metaphysical aspect of the religious problem, and only study it in its social or political aspects. ”

“ In its landscape everything fugitive gives place to what is enduring and elemental; it bears the impress of eternity rather than of time. Living in this austere but serene ambience, between the mountains and the sea, Unamuno found a refreshment of mental and spiritual energy, the activity of his inner life was perhaps never more intense and what he wrote during his four months’ exile was quarried from those deeper strata of his spirit where thought and passion lie embedded in a single matrix. ”

“ It is Antonia Quixano, who, because she has a small soul and no belief in her husband’s greatness, keeps him at home and hinders him from going forth to seek heroic adventures which would win him glory and an everlasting name. If it were only Dulcinea!... Dulcinea, yes, for however strange it may seem, Dulcinea can make a man renounce all glory, can make him choose the glory of renouncing glory. Dulcinea, or let us rather call her Aldonza, the ideal Aldonza might say to him: “Come, come to my arms and let all your wild longings melt away in tears upon my breast. ”

“ You appear to me to be an optimist, or at any rate a man who believes that progress will alleviate the pains of mankind; you speak with a certain unction of the noble crusade of thought and of the great enterprise of culture, and I believe that the best that this enterprise can do is to make us forget that we have been born and that we have to die. I confess that I have a tragic sense of life. I confess it without petulance or pedantry, and I know that you will not doubt my sincerity. ”