Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra Quotes

It is by rugged paths like these they go That scale the heights of immortality, Unreached by those that falter here below.

Why do you lead me a wild-goose chase?

By the one God, Sancho, no more proverbs.

Your grace's words have been like manure spread on the barren ground of my dry and uncultivated mind.

There is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain which death does not remove.

I have never died all my life

I will take my corporal oath that we move no faster than a snail can gallop, or an ant can trot.

What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?

Let each look to himself and not try to make out white black, and black white; for each of us is as God made him, aye, and often worse.

I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.

Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred.

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world

Art does not surpass nature but perfects it.

At this the duchess, laughing all the while, said: Sancho Panza is right in all he has said, and will be right in all he shall say ...

With these meager scraps of Latin and the like, you may perhaps be taken for a scholar, which is honorable and profitable these days.

You should know, Sancho, that a man is not worth more than any other if he does not do more than any other.

Trying to stop slanderers' tongues is like trying to put gates to the open plain.

[reading a work in translation] is like viewing a piece of Flemish tapestry on the wrong side.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

He who does not know how to take advantage of luck when it comes to him, has no right to complain if it gives him the go-by;

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

Ye love-smitten host, know that to Dulcinea only I am dough and sugar-paste, flint to all others; for her I am honey, for you aloes. For

I was born like everyone else, and a man must not live in dependence on anyone except God;

The village to sell (saving your presence) four pigs, and between dues and cribbings they got out of me little less than the worth of them. As

Maybe the greatest madness is to see life as it is rather than what it could be.

All sorrows are less with bread.

Where envy reigns virtue can't exist, and generosity doesn't go with meanness.

Since Cervantes's magnificent Knight's quest has cosmological scope and reverberation, no object seems beyond reach.

The praise of the wise few is more important than the mockery of the foolish many,

( ... ) and it will be easier, remember, to bend thy will to love one who adores thee, than to lead one to love thee who abhors thee now.

In the shadow of feigned cripples and false wounds come the strong arms of thieves and very healthy drunkards.

She wanted, with her fickleness, to make my destruction constant; I want, by trying to destroy myself, to satisfy her desire.

I've always heard the old folks say that if you don't know how to enjoy good luck when it comes, you shouldn't complain if it passes you by.

Your grace, come back, Senor Don Quixote, I swear to God you're charging sheep !

The fault lies not with the mob, who demands nonsense, but with those who do not know how to produce anything else.

There were no embraces, because where there is great love there is often little display of it.

A Man Without Honor
is Worse than Dead.

After the gratifications of brutish appetites are past, the greatest pleasure then is to get rid of that which entertained it.

But one of shallow wit, somewhat like a saltshaker with very little salt. In

Perceived a cart covered with royal flags coming along the road they were travelling; and persuaded that this must be some new adventure,

Heaven send us better times! There is nothing but plotting and counter-plotting, undermining and counter-mining in this world.

I do not insist," answered Don Quixote, "that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.

This fierce basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, supercilious wretch, will neither seek, serve, own, nor follow you in any shape whatever.

Thy enterprises speed, Didst thou the light mid Libya's sands Or Jaca's rocks first see?

So it isn't the masses who are to blame for demanding rubbish, but rather those who aren't capable of providing them with anything else.

Honesty's the best policy.

What intelligent things you say sometimes ! One would think you had studied.

The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the sum of his own works.

[W]omen are born with the obligation to obey their husbands even if they're fools.

Only make yourself honey and the flies will suck you.

I have always heard it said, Sancho, that to do good to boors is to throw water into the sea.

My heart is wax molded as she pleases, but enduring as marble to retain.

A tooth is much more to be prized than a diamond.

He who's down one day can be up the next, unless he really wants to stay in bed, that is ...

Take care, Sancho," said Samson; "honours change manners, and perhaps when you find yourself a governor you won't know the mother that bore you.

He who sings scares away his woes.

Never mind what some will say, for then thou wilt never have done. One may as soon tie up the winds, as the tongues of slanderers.

We have come to the church, Sancho.

Nay, what is even worse, he may become a poet, which they say is an incurable and infectious disease." "This

A bad year and a bad month to all the backbiting bitches in the world! ...

Could see you all strung by the gills, like sardines on a twig!

Vagabond knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, otherwise called 'The Knight of the Rueful Countenance.

Be slow of tongue and quick of eye.

Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.

The eyes those silent tongues of love.

There's no taking trout with dry breeches.

at times the just must pay for sinners.

What is more dangerous than to become a poet? which is, as some say, an incurable and infectious disease.

What I can tell your grace is that it deals with truths, and they are truths so appealing and elegant that no lies can equal them.

When a rich man is hurt, his wail goeth heavens high. (Sancho Panza)

Casildea de Vandalia, the rawest and best

When a man knows not how to read, or is left-handed, it

Path of knight-errantry, and in pursuit of that calling I despise wealth, but not honour. I

Windmills were giants, and the monks' mules dromedaries, flocks of sheep armies of enemies,

All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.

[He] is not going to exit to applause, even if the entire human race should favor him.

It is the privilege and charm of beauty to win the heart and secure good-will,

He'd just fallen off a rock and got a little bit spifflicated in the ribs.

For hope is always born at the same time as love ...

Scholarship without virtue is like pearls pearls

Sancho tried to amuse him and cheer him up by chatting to him, and said, among other things, what is recorded in the next chapter.

The wounds received in battle bestow honor, they do not take it away ...

He is most blessed who loves the most, the freest who is most enslaved by love,

An escape from penalty is better than petitioning the judges.

Didn't i tell you they were only windmills? And someone with windmills on the brain could have failed to see that!

The landlord replied he had no chickens, for the kites had stolen them.

Where one door shuts, another opens.

For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.

Anyone who is ignorant, even a lord and prince, can and should be counted as one of the mob.

There is no book so bad ... that it does not have something good in it.

for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, or a body without a soul.

All human efforts to communicate - even in the same language - are equally utopian, equally luminous with value, and equally worth the doing.

Knight of the Ill-Favored Face.

That which costs little is less valued.

It is never my custom to plunder those I over come.

Let his sin be his punishment, let him eat it with his bread, and let that be an end to it.

This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

The sadness of the heart rises to the face, and in the eyes may be read the history of that which passes in the soul.

There are many hours and minutes between now and tomorrowand in any one of them-even in a minute,the house falls

A closed mouth catches no flies.