Quotes from Don Quixote

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“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!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“There were no embraces, because where there is great love there is often little display of it.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“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.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“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.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“Es natural condición de las mujeres desdeñar a quien las quiere y amar a quien las aborrece”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“... he who's down one day can be up the next, unless he really wants to stay in bed, that is...”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“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.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“I was born free, and that I might live in freedom I chose the solitude of the fields; in the trees of the mountains I find society, the clear waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire afar off, a sword laid aside. Those whom I have inspired with love by letting them see me, I have by words undeceived, and if their longings live on hope—and I have given none to Chrysostom or to any other—it cannot justly be said that the death of any is my doing, for it was rather his own obstinacy than my cruelty that killed him; and if it be made a charge against me that his wishes were honourable, and that therefore I was bound to yield to them, I answer that when on this very spot where now his grave is made he declared to me his purity of purpose, I told him that mine was to live in perpetual solitude, and that the earth alone should enjoy the fruits of my retirement and the spoils of my beauty; and if, after this open avowal, he chose to persist against hope and steer against the wind, what wonder is it that he should sink in the depths of his infatuation? If I had encouraged him, I should be false; if I had gratified him, I should have acted against my own better resolution and purpose. He was persistent in spite of warning, he despaired without being hated. Bethink you now if it be reasonable that his suffering should be laid to my charge. Let him who has been deceived complain, let him give way to despair whose encouraged hopes have proved vain, let him flatter himself whom I shall entice, let him boast whom I shall receive; but let not him call me cruel or homicide to whom I make no promise, upon whom I practise no deception, whom I neither entice nor receive. It has not been so far the will of Heaven that I should love by fate, and to expect me to love by choice is idle. Let this general declaration serve for each of my suitors on his own account, and let it be understood from this time forth that if anyone dies for me it is not of jealousy or misery he dies, for she who loves no one can give no cause for jealousy to any, and candour is not to be confounded with scorn. Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. If Chrysostom's impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“A bad year and a bad month to all the backbiting bitches in the world!...”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“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.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“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.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“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.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“Wit and humor do not reside in slow minds.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“The wounds received in battle bestow honor, they do not take it away...”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“...for hope is always born at the same time as love...”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“A tooth is much more to be prized than a diamond.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“The most perceptive character in a play is the fool, because the man who wishes to seem simple cannot possibly be a simpleton.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“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.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

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“So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence.”
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