TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 25 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is impressed.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index U > Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

Thumbnail of Miguel de Unamuno (source)
Miguel de Unamuno
(29 Sep 1864 - 31 Dec 1936)

Spanish novelist and philosopher whose works included essays, novels, poetry and theatrical plays. He was a modernist and an intellectual.

Science Quotes by Miguel de Unamuno (11 quotes)

All knowledge has an ultimate goal. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the question.
— Miguel de Unamuno
Tragic Sense of Life (1913), translated by John Ernest Crawford Flitch (1954), 90.
Science quotes on:  |  Goal (155)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Question (649)  |  Sake (61)  |  Say (989)  |  Ultimate (152)  |  Will (2350)

Only one who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.
— Miguel de Unamuno
From the original Spanish, “Sólo el que ensaya lo absurdo es capaz de conquistar lo imposible,” in Vida de D. Quijote y Sancho: Según Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Explicada y Comentada por Miguel de Unamuno (1905), 175-176. Translated by J.E. Crawford Flitch in Miguel de Unamuno: Essays and Soliloquies (1925), 104-105. This predates the quote attributed (without a known primary source) to M.C. Escher: “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.”
Science quotes on:  |  Absurd (60)  |  Achieve (75)  |  Attempt (266)  |  Capable (174)  |  Impossible (263)

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.
— Miguel de Unamuno
Tragic Sense of Life (1913), translated by John Ernest Crawford Flitch (1954), 90.
Science quotes on:  |  Idea (881)  |  Life (1870)

Science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.
— Miguel de Unamuno
In Miguel de Unamuno and John Ernest Crawford Flitch (trans.), 'Arbitrary Reflections Upon Europeanization', Essays and Soliloquies, (1925), 55.
Science quotes on:  |  Being (1276)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Facts (553)  |  Phantom (9)  |  Rob (6)  |  Usually (176)  |  Wisdom (235)

Science says: “We must live,” and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: “We must die,” and seeks how to make us die well.
— Miguel de Unamuno
'Arbitrary Reflections', Essays and Soliloquies, translated by John Ernest Crawford Flitch (1925), 154. In Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), 844:9.
Science quotes on:  |  Acceptable (14)  |  Death (406)  |  Life (1870)  |  Live (650)  |  Making (300)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Must (1525)  |  Say (989)  |  Seek (218)  |  Wisdom (235)

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are—that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.
— Miguel de Unamuno
In Tragic Sense of Life (1913), translated by John Ernest Crawford Flitch (1954), 193.
Science quotes on:  |  Choose (116)  |  Effect (414)  |  Enquiry (89)  |  Judge (114)  |  Know (1538)  |  Reason (766)  |  Say (989)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Truth (1109)

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. The one is the man who studies the problem and the other is the man who gives us a formula, correct or incorrect, as the solution of it.
— Miguel de Unamuno
'My Religion', Essays and Soliloquies, translated by John Ernest Crawford Flitch (1925), 56. In Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), 844:9.
Science quotes on:  |  Assert (69)  |  Doubt (314)  |  Formula (102)  |  Investigate (106)  |  Man (2252)  |  Mean (810)  |  Other (2233)  |  Problem (731)  |  Research (753)  |  Solution (282)  |  Think (1122)

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant.
— Miguel de Unamuno
Tragic Sense of Life (1913), translated by John Ernest Crawford Flitch (1954), 93.
Science quotes on:  |  Doubt (314)  |  Ignorant (91)  |  True Science (25)  |  Truth (1109)

Was man made for science, or was science made for man?
— Miguel de Unamuno
Tragic Sense of Life (1913), translated by John Ernest Crawford Flitch (1954), 12.
Science quotes on:  |  Man (2252)  |  Science And Man (2)

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
In Tragic Sense of Life (1913), translated by John Ernest Crawford Flitch (1954), 99.
Science quotes on:  |  Problem (731)  |  Something (718)  |  Stupid (38)  |  Superfluous (21)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Worth (172)

While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.
— Miguel de Unamuno
Tragic Sense of Life (1913), translated by John Ernest Crawford Flitch (1954), 23.
Science quotes on:  |  Fact (1257)  |  Life (1870)  |  Sake (61)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Truth (1109)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing
on Blue Sky.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.