Miguel De Cervantes Quotes

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

The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.

The proof of the pudding is the eating.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

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

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

Hunger is the best sauce in the world.

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

El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho.

All sorrows are less with bread.

Until death it is all life

Thou hast seen nothing yet.

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

Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.

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

Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.

Time ripens all things; no man is born wise.

Es natural condición de las mujeres desdeñar a quien las quiere y amar a quien las aborrece

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

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Wit and humor do not reside in slow minds.

Facts are the enemy of truth.

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

Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed.

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

The most perceptive character in a play is the fool, because the man who wishes to seem simple cannot possibly be a simpleton.

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.

All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse.

Those who will play with cats must expect to be scratched.

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

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

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

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

Diligence is the mother of good fortune.

Drink moderately, for drunkeness neither keeps a secret, nor observes a promise.

Amor y deseo son dos cosas diferentes; que no todo lo que se ama se desea, ni todo lo que se desea se ama.

Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

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

The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one.

Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.

It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.

Confía en el tiempo, que suele dar dulces salidas a muchas amargas dificultades...

It's up to brave hearts, sir, to be patient when things are going badly, as well as being happy when they're going well ... For I've heard that what they call fortune is a flighty woman who drinks too much, and, what's more, she's blind, so she can't see what she's doing, and she doesn't know who she's knocking over or who she's raising up.

... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.

Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth." "What giants?" Asked Sancho Panza. "The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long." "Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone." "Obviously," replied Don Quijote, "you don't know much about adventures.

...without intelligence, there can be no humour.

Abundance, even of good things, prevents them from being valued

There is remedy for all things except death - Don Quixote De La Mancha

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

A Man Without Honor is Worse than Dead.

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.

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

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

To dream the impossible dream, that is my quest.

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.

They must take me for a fool, or even worse, a lunatic. And no wonder ,for I am so intensely conscious of my misfortune and my misery is so overwhelming that I am powerless to resist it and am being turned into stone, devoid of all knowledge or feeling.

Muchos son los andantes," dijo Sancho. Muchos," respondió don Quijote, "pero pocos los que merecen nombre de caballeros.

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

Laughter distances us from that which is ugly and therefore potentially distressing, and indeed enables us to obtain paradoxical pleasure and therapeutic benefit from it.

The greatest madness a man can be guilty of in this life, is to let himself die outright, without being slain by any person whatever, or destroyed by any other weapon than the hands of melancholy

I have never died all my life

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical may be madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness ...Maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

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

One who loses wealth loses much. One who loses a friend loses more. But one who loses courage loses all.

time has more power to undo and change things than the human will.

Here lies a gentleman bold Who was so very brave He went to lengths untold, And on the brink of the grave Death had on him no hold. By the world he set small store-- He frightened it to the core-- Yet somehow, by Fate's plan, Though he'd lived a crazy man, When he died he was sane once more.

Cambiar el mundo, amigo Sancho, que no es locura ni utopía, sino Justicia!". Don Quijote.

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

There are two kinds of beauty, one being of the soul and the other of the body, That of the soul is revealed through intelligence, modesty, right conduct, Generosity and good breeding, all of which qualities may exist in an ugly man; And when one's gaze is fixed upon beauty of this sort and not upon that of the body, Love is usually born suddenly and violently.

The eyes those silent tongues of love.

There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.

Señor, las tristezas no se hicieron para las bestias, sino para los hombres; pero si los hombres las sienten demasiado, se vuelven bestias...

One man is no more than another, if he do no more than what another does.

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

A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty.

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

Tell me what company thou keepst, and I'll tell thee what thou art.

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.

Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.

La pluma es la lengua del alma: cuales fueren los conceptos que en ella se engendraren, tales serán sus escritos.

Honesty's the best policy.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

En un lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme...

Yo no creo en brujas, pero que las hay, las hay.

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

The reason of the unreasonableness which against my reason is wrought, doth so weaken my reason, as with all reason I do justly complain on your beauty.

For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.

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

:اذا وقع الحجر على الابريق ,فويل للابريق ,واذا وقع الابريق على الحجر ,فالويل أيضا للابريق مثل اسبانى

Where one door shuts, another opens.

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.

¿Qué gigantes?

All of that is true,’ responded Don Quixote, ‘but we cannot all be friars, and God brings His children to heaven by many paths: chivalry is a religion, and there are sainted knights in Glory.’ Yes,’ responded Sancho, ‘but I’ve heard that there are more friars in heaven than knights errant.’ That is true,’ responded Don Quixote, ‘because the number of religious is greater than the number of knights.’ There are many who are errant,’ said Sancho. Many,’ responded Don Quixote, ‘but few who deserve to be called knights.

To think that the affairs of this life always remain in the same state is a vain presumption; indeed they all seem to be perpetually changing and moving in a circular course. Spring is followed by summer, summer by autumn, and autumn by winter, which is again followed by spring, and so time continues its everlasting round. But the life of man is ever racing to its end, swifter than time itself, without hope of renewal, unless in the next that is limitless and infinite.

La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos; con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierra la tierra ni el mar encubre; por la libertad, así como por la honra, se puede y debe aventurar la vida, y, por el contrario, el cautiverio es el mayor mal que puede venir a los hombres.

Woman is made of fragile glass; but do not put her to the test to see if she will break, for that might come to pass. She is too apt to shatter, and wisdom is surely ended if what can ne'er be mended is put in the way of danger. What I say to you is true, and let us all agree : wherever Danae may be, showers of gold are there, too.

Oh Senor" said the niece. "Your grace should send them to be burned (books), just like all the rest, because it's very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease.

Have I not already told you', replied Don Quixote, 'that I intend to imitate Amadis, and to act the desperate, foolish, furious lover so as also to imitate the valiant Orlando, when he found signs by a spring that the fair Angelica had disgraced herself with Medoro, and the grief turned him mad, and he uprooted trees, sullied the waters of clear springs, slew shepherds, destroyed flocks, burned cottages, tore down houses, dragged away mares and performed a hundred other excesses, worthy to be recorded on the tablets of eternal fame?' [...] 'But to my mind', said Sancho, 'the knights who did all that were pushed into it and had their reasons for their antics and their penances, but what reason have you got for going mad?' 'That is the whole point', replied Don Quixote, 'and therein lies the beauty of my enterprise. A Knight Errant going mad for a good reason - there is neither pleasure nor merit in that. The thing is to become insane without a cause and have my lady think: If I do all this when dry, what would I not do when wet?