Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra Quotes

Thou hast seen nothing yet.

The Panza is here," said Sancho, before anyone could reply, "and Don Quixotissimus too; and so, most distressedest Duenissima, you may say what you willissimus, for we are all readissimus to do you any servissimus.

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

Every man is the child of his own deeds

Another thing to strive for: reading your history should move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it.

Now, tell me which is the greater deed, raising a dead man or killing a giant?" "The answer is self-evident," responded Don Quixote. "It is greater to raise a dead man.

Plunge, scoundrel, rogue, monster - for such I take thee to be - plunge, I say, into the mare magnum of their histories; and if thou shalt find that any squire ever said or thought what thou hast said now, I will let thee nail it on my forehead, and give me, over and above, four sound slaps in the face.

Remember that I'm old enough to give advice, and the advice I'm giving you now is exactly right, and a bird in the hand is better than a vulture in the air, ...

And the first thing I have got to say is, that for my own part I hold my master Don Quixote to be stark mad, though sometimes he says things that, to my mind, and indeed everybody's that listens to him, are so wise, and run in such a straight furrow, that Satan himself could not have said them better; but for all that, really, and beyond all question, it's my firm belief he is cracked.

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

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

That night the housekeeper burned all the books there were in the stable yard and in all the house; and there must have been some that went up in smoke which should have been preserved in everlasting archives, if the one who did the scrutinizing had not been so indolent. Thus we see the truth of the old saying, to the effect that the innocent must sometimes pay for the sins of the guilty.

We know already ample experience that it does not require much cleverness or much learning to be a governor, for there are a hundred round about us that scarcely know how to read.

A king's crumb is worth more than a lord's loaf." 'This

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.

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

The eyes those silent tongues of love.

But I'll take you, Don Clown stuffed with garlic," said Don Quixote, "and tie you to a tree as naked as when your mother brought you forth, and give you, not to say three thousand three hundred, but six thousand six hundred lashes, and so well laid on that they won't be got rid of if you try three thousand three hundred times; don't answer me a word or I'll tear your soul out.

Don't you be worried or annoyed, Sancho, about any comments you hear, or there will never be an end to them. Keep a safe conscience and let people say what they like: trying to still gossips' tongues is like putting up doors in open fields. If the governor leaves office rich they say he's a thief, and if he leaves it poor they say he's a milksop and a fool.

Although this is poetic fiction, it contains hidden moral truths worthy of being heeded and understood and imitated, ...

As regards your government of yourself and your household, Sancho, my first piece of advice is to be clean and to cut your fingernails, and not to let them grow long, as some people do, moved by ignorance to believe that long nails make their hand look beautiful, as if those appendages, those excrescences that they leave uncut have any right to be called fingernails at all, because they are more like talons of a kestrel: a monstrous and filthy abuse.

After he in his memory and imagination had made up, struck out, and discarded many names, now adding to and now subtracting from the list, he finally hit upon "Rocinante," a name that impressed him as being sonorous and at the same time indicative of what the steed had been when it was but a hack, whereas now it was nothing other than the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.

removal of the wool from those venerable countenances depended upon it.

It seems to me a hard case to make slaves of those whom God and nature have made free.

Only make yourself honey and the flies will suck you.

I don't see what my arse has to do with enchantings!

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

He robbed him of a great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn books written in verse into another language, for, with all the pains they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the level of the originals as they were first produced.

The proof of the pudding is the eating.

He tried his luck again, and things went so smoothly that with no more noise or disturbance than the last time, he found himself rid of the burden that had caused him so much grief. But since Don Quixote had a sense of smell as acute as his hearing, and Sancho was joined so closely to him, and the vapors rose up almost in a straight line, some unavoidably reached his nostrils, and as soon as they did he came to the assistance of his nostrils and squeezed them closed between two fingers, and in a somewhat nasal voice, he said: It seems to me, Sancho, that you are very frightened.

I want you to see me naked and performing one or two dozen mad acts, which will take me less than half an hour, because if you have seen them with your own eyes, you can safely swear to any others you might wish to add.

I have vanquished giants, and I have sent villains and malefactors to her, but where can they find her if she has been enchanted and transformed into the ugliest peasant girl anyone can imagine?

Señor,' responded Sancho, 'withdrawing is not running away, and waiting is not sensible when danger outweighs hope, and wise men know to save something for tomorrow and not risk everything in a single day.

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

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.

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

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

Great hearts, my dear master, should be patient in misfortune as well as joyful in prosperity. And this I judge from myself. For if I was merry when I was Governor now that I'm a squire on foot I'm not sad, for I've heard tell that Fortune, as they call her, is a drunken and capricious woman and, worse still, blind; and so she doesn't see what she's doing, and doesn't know whom she is casting down or raising up.

In a village of La Mancha,

What covers you discovers you.

But I have heard it said," said Don Quixote, "that troubles take wing for the man who can sing.

To win the good-will of the people thou governest there are two things, among others, that thou must do; one is to be civil to all (this, however, I told thee before), and the other to take care that food be abundant, for there is nothing that vexes the heart of the poor more than hunger and high prices. Make not many proclamations; but those thou makest take care that they be good ones, and above all that they be observed and carried out; for proclamations that are not observed are the same as if they did not exist; nay, they encourage the idea that the prince who had the wisdom and authority to make them had not the power to enforce them; and laws that threaten and are not enforced come to be like the log, the king of the frogs, that frightened them at first, but that in time they despised and mounted upon. Be a father to virtue and a stepfather to vice. Be not always strict, nor yet always lenient, but observe a mean between these two extremes, for in that is the aim of wisdom. Visit the gaols, the slaughter-houses, and the market-places; for the presence of the governor is of great importance in such places; it comforts the prisoners who are in hopes of a speedy release, it is the bugbear of the butchers who have then to give just weight, and it is the terror of the market-women for the same reason. Let it not be seen that thou art (even if perchance thou art, which I do not believe) covetous, a follower of women, or a glutton; for when the people and those that have deal

And as the wicked are always ungrateful, and necessity leads to evil doing, and immediate advantage overcomes all considerations of the future, Ginés, who was neither grateful nor well-principled, made up his mind to steal Sancho Panza's ass.

To dream the impossible dream, that is my quest.

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

According to an ancient and common tradition in the kingdom of Great Britain, this king did not die, but was transformed into a raven by the art of enchantment and, in the course of time, he shall return to rule again and regain his kingdom and his scepter.

"Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

Consider, that no jewel upon earth is comparable to a woman of virtue and honor; and, that the honor of the sex consists in the fair characters they maintain.

Casildea de Vandalia, the rawest and best

A travesty that for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in the literature of that day.

I only understand that while I'm sleeping I have no fear, or hope, or trouble, or glory; blessed be whoever invented sleep, the mantle that covers all human thought...

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

He who reads much and walks much, goes far and knows much," Miguel de Cervantes

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.

Love, as I have heard say, sometimes flies and sometimes walks; with this one it runs, with that it moves slowly; some it cools, others it burns; some it wounds, others it slays; it begins in the course of its desires, and at the same moment completes and end it; in the morning it will lay siege to a fortress and by night will have taken it, for there is no power than can resist it.

It is a balsam," answered Don Quixote, "the receipt of which I have in my memory, with which one need have no fear of death, or dread dying of any wound; and so when I make it and give it to thee thou hast nothing to do when in some battle thou seest they have cut me in half through the middle of the body - as is wont to happen frequently, - but neatly and with great nicety, ere the blood congeal, to place that portion of the body which shall have fallen to the ground upon the other half which remains in the saddle, taking care to fit it on evenly and exactly. Then thou shalt give me to drink but two drops of the balsam I have mentioned, and thou shalt see me become sounder than an apple.

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

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

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

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

A Man Without Honor
is Worse than Dead.

And remember, my son, that it is better for the soldier to smell of gunpowder than of civet, and that if old age should come upon you in this honourable calling, though you may be covered with wounds and crippled and lame, it will not come upon you without honour, and that such as poverty cannot lessen; especially now that provisions are being made for supporting and relieving old and disabled soldiers; for it is not right to deal with them after the fashion of those who set free and get rid of their black slaves when they are old and useless, and, turning them out of their houses under the pretence of making them free, make them slaves to hunger, from which they cannot expect to be released except by death.

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.

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

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

Men have to have friends even in hell.

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

When the head aches, all the members partake of the pain.

He seized a bucket and plunging it into one of the half jars took up three hens and a couple of geese,

Time ripens all things; no man is born wise.

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

Who was the first man that scratched his head? For to my thinking it must have been our father Adam.

Happy the age, happy the time, to which the ancients gave the name of golden, not because in that fortunate age the gold so coveted in this our iron one was gained without toil, but because they that lived in it knew not the two words "mine" and "thine"!

This was the first time that he thoroughly felt and believed himself to be a knight-errant in reality and not merely in fancy, now that he saw himself treated in the same way as he had read of such knights being treated in days of yore.

Fortune always leaves a door open in adversity in order to bring relief to it,

Not only a countess but a nymph of the greenwood,

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

Secondly, thou must keep in view what thou art, striving to know thyself, the

All the world stand, unless all the world confess that in all the world there is no maiden fairer than the Empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso.

By God and upon my conscience", said the devil, "I never observed it, for my mind is occupied with so many different things that I was forgetting the main thing I came about." "This demon must be an honest fellow and a good Christian," said Sancho; "for if he wasn't he wouldn't swear by God and his conscience; I feel sure now there must be good souls even in hell itself.

And letting out thirty groans and sixty sighs and one hundred and twenty curses on the head of the person who'd brought him there, he hauled himself to his feet,

Whoever undertakes a long journey, if he be wise, makes it his business to find out an agreeable companion. How cautious then should he be, who is to take a journey for life, whose fellow-traveler must not part with him but at the grave; his companion at bed and board and sharer of all the pleasures and fatigues of his journey, as the wife must be to the husband! She is no such sort of ware, that a man can be rid of when he pleases: when once that is purchased, no exchange, no sale, no alienation can be made.

In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.

Poetry, gentle sir, is, as I take it, like a tender young maiden of supreme beauty, to array, bedeck, and adorn whom is the task of several other maidens,

Sancho, when a man knows not how to read, or is left-handed, it argues one of two things; either that he was the son of exceedingly mean and lowly parents, or that he himself was so incorrigible and ill-conditioned that neither good company nor good teaching could make any impression on him.

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

But my thoughts ran a wool-gathering; and I did like the countryman, who looked for his ass while he was mounted on his back. Don Quixote (pt. II, ch. LVII)

Thou knowest that my voice is sweet, That is if thou dost hear; And I am moulded in a form Somewhat below the mean.

experienced in the things of the world, everything that has some difficulty about it seems to thee impossible; but time will pass, as I said before, and I will tell thee some of the things I saw down there which will make thee believe what I have related now, the truth of which admits of neither reply nor question.

Also saw that the number of simpleminded men is greater than that of the prudent, and though it is better to be praised by a few wise men and mocked by many fools,

Knight of the Ill-Favored Face.

The journey is better than the inn".

Many go out for wool, and come home shorn themselves.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.

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

Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

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

Let's turn now to the citation of authors, found in other books and missing in yours. The solution to this is very simple, because all you have to do is find a book that cites them all from A to Z, as you put it. Then you'll put that same alphabet in your book, and though the lie is obvious it doesn't matter, since you'll have little need to use them; perhaps someone will be naive enough to believe you have consulted all of them in your plain and simple history; if it serves no other purpose, at least a lengthy catalogue of authors will give the book an unexpected authority. Furthermore, no one will try to determine if you followed them or did not follow them, having nothing to gain from that.

And what hast thou gained by the government?" asked Ricote. "I have gained," said Sancho, "the knowledge that I am no good for governing,