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Who really said it

Only One Who Attempts the Absurd Is Capable of Achieving the Impossible

Not Albert Einstein — actually Miguel de Unamuno Miguel de Unamuno 1864–1936 · Spanish philosopher, novelist, poet and rector of Salamanca
Disputed Free to reuse

Unamuno wrote it in Spanish in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905), his book-length commentary on Cervantes: “Sólo el que ensaya lo absurdo es capaz de conquistar lo imposible.” The English wording most people know comes from J. E. Crawford Flitch’s translation in Essays and Soliloquies (Knopf, 1925). Quote Investigator ↗ finds no substantive support for the attributions to Einstein or M. C. Escher.

Last verified 30 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Only One Who Attempts the Absurd Is Capable of Achieving the Impossible” not Albert Einstein. Miguel de Unamuno, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905), 175–76: “Sólo el que ensaya lo absurdo es capaz de conquistar lo imposible.” English translation by J. E. Crawford Flitch, Essays and Soliloquies (Knopf, 1925), 104–5. — Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Albert Einstein. Use the credit shown above instead.

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Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

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In context

Evoking the world of Miguel de Unamuno — Spanish philosopher, novelist, poet and playwright. Theme: "Only One Who Attempts the Absurd Is Capable of Achieving the Impossible". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Only One Who Attempts the Absurd Is Capable of Achieving the Impossible". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Original work
Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, según Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, explicada y comentada
Author and date
Miguel de Unamuno, 1905 (Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fe) — Quote Investigator cites the passage at pages 175–176
English translation
J. E. Crawford Flitch, in Essays and Soliloquies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925; copyright 1924), pages 104–105
Attributed to Einstein by
1997 — the earliest Einstein ascription Quote Investigator locates, in a Drexel University commencement address

¿Que es ello absurdo? — decís. ¿Y quién sabe qué es lo absurdo? ¡Y aunque lo fuera! Sólo el que ensaya lo absurdo es capaz de conquistar lo imposible. No hay más que un modo de dar una vez en el clavo, y es dar ciento en la herradura. Y sobre todo no hay más que un modo de triunfar de veras: arrostrar el ridículo. Unamuno, 1905

Flitch’s 1925 English: “But it was absurd, you say? And who knows what is absurd and what is not? And even if it were! Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.” The passage is about a Salamanca man mocked for carrying sea-bream spawn inland to stock a pond in Castile — and making a fortune from it.

Scanned Spanish printing (full view)
Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1914) at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: Only One Who Attempts the Absurd

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator ↗ identifies the origin as Miguel de Unamuno’s Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho of 1905, quotes the Spanish, and concludes that “the linkages to Einstein and Escher are unsupported and appear to be spurious”.
  • We did not take that on trust. We downloaded the full scanned text of a Madrid: Renacimiento printing of 1914 ↗ from the Internet Archive and searched it: the sentence “Sólo el que ensaya lo absurdo es capaz de conquistar lo imposible” is there, in the passage about the man who carried sea-bream spawn to a Castilian pond — the same passage Flitch’s English renders. Note this is a later printing, not the first edition. Datings differ: Quote Investigator cites a 1905 first edition from Librería de Fernando Fe in Madrid, verified in Google Books Full View, while Wikipedia’s Unamuno bibliography dates the work 1914. We follow Quote Investigator, and flag the discrepancy rather than leave you to find it.
  • The English wording travelled through Essays and Soliloquies ↗, translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch and published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1925; the Internet Archive’s catalogue record confirms that edition. Burton Stevenson’s Home Book of Quotations reprinted it with a correct Unamuno credit in 1935.
  • Quote Investigator records that the poet Robin Morgan used the “she” variant in Sisterhood Is Global (1984) and expressly called it “a feminist proverb of indeterminate origin” — she claimed no authorship. The Einstein ascription appears by 1997, the Escher one by 2007.
Public domain

Unamuno’s Spanish original was published in 1905 and J. E. Crawford Flitch’s English translation in 1925 — both before 1931, so both are in the public domain in the United States. The wording is free to reuse; the credit still belongs to Unamuno.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

One Spanish sentence about Don Quixote, later handed to three different people who did not write it.

Albert Einstein Refuted

Quote Investigator finds no substantive support ↗ for the linkage. Its earliest Einstein instance is from 1997, more than forty years after Einstein’s death and more than ninety years after Unamuno wrote the line.

M. C. Escher Refuted

The artist of impossible objects is an inviting home for a sentence about achieving the impossible, but the ascription is unsupported and only appears by 2007, in a book of lists.

Robin Morgan Popularizer, not author

Morgan’s group used the “Only she who attempts the absurd…” form in Sisterhood Is Global (1984), but she called it a feminist proverb of indeterminate origin ↗ rather than her own. She disclaimed credit; others assigned it to her anyway.

Miguel de Unamuno Genuine

Written in Spanish in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905). We confirmed it in a scanned printing at the Internet Archive ↗.

The sentence belongs to Miguel de Unamuno, writing about Don Quixote in 1905 — as Quote Investigator concludes ↗ and as the scanned Spanish text confirms.

Context

Why it mattered

Unamuno was not writing a motivational slogan. He was arguing, through Cervantes, that his country’s real affliction was moral cowardice — the refusal to look ridiculous in defence of what you believe. The sentence lands as the payoff to a small, deliberately unglamorous story about a man mocked for stocking a Castilian pond with sea fish, who was right.

That is why the next line in the passage matters as much as the famous one: there is only one way of really triumphing, Unamuno writes, and it is to face ridicule. Detached from the Quixote commentary, the sentence becomes a graduation-speech flourish. In place, it is a rebuke.

There is only one way of achieving a real triumph, and that is by facing ridicule with serenity.

Read the full story

The line reached a wide English-speaking audience through the theatre. Dale Wasserman, who wrote Man of La Mancha, said in his introduction to the published play that the motif of the attempt came from “another brilliant Miguel, Unamuno”, and quoted this sentence — correctly credited.

Quote Investigator traces the drift from there: an unattributed “she” variant at a 1974 women’s-club luncheon in Florida, a 1982 slogan T-shirt advertised in Mother Jones, the 1984 Sisterhood Is Global use, then Einstein in 1997 and Escher by 2007. At no point does anyone produce a source in Einstein’s writing.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Courage Purpose

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: Only One Who Attempts the Absurdquoteinvestigator.com

The full investigation, with the 1905 Spanish, Flitch’s translation and the chain of misattributions.
Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1914 printing)archive.org

Full scanned text of Unamuno’s commentary — the book that contains the original sentence.
Essays and Soliloquies (Knopf, 1925)archive.org

J. E. Crawford Flitch’s translation, the route the English wording travelled by.
Miguel de Unamunoen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the philosopher, novelist and rector of the University of Salamanca.
Wikiquote: Albert Einsteinen.wikiquote.org

The sourced and misattributed collections for comparison.

The author

About Miguel de Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno

1864–1936 · Spanish philosopher, novelist, poet and playwright

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was among the most forceful Spanish writers of his generation — a philosopher, novelist, poet and playwright who served twice as rector of the University of Salamanca. His central subject was the conflict between reason and the human refusal to accept oblivion, argued in Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1913). Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905) reads Cervantes’s novel as a spiritual text and treats Quixote’s willingness to look ridiculous as a virtue rather than a joke.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Miguel de Unamuno, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, según Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, explicada y comentada (Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fe, 1905), 175–76. English: Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), 104–5.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Only One Who Attempts the Absurd Is Capable of Achieving the Impossible’?” Last verified 30 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/only-one-who-attempts-the-absurd-is-capable-of-achieving/

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