Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Quotes

He who sees a play that is regular, and answerable to the rules of poetry, is pleased with the comic part, informed by the serious, surprised at the variety of accidents, improved by the language, war...

I can say that since I have been a knight-errant I have become valiant, polite, generous, well-bred, magnanimous, courteous, dauntless, gentle, patient, and have learned to bear hardships, imprisonmen...

I do not think it is wise to force them to study one thing or another, although persuading them to do so would not be harmful; and when there is no need to study pane lucrando,1 if the student is so f...

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

I have never died all my life

I heard them name them when they were tossing me, and one was called Pedro Martinez,

I know, with the natural understanding that God has given me, that everything beautiful is lovable, but I cannot grasp why, simply because it is loved, the thing loved for its beauty is obliged to lov...

I wanted only to offer it to you plain and bare, unadorned by a prologue or the endless catalogue of sonnets, epigrams and laudatory poems that are usually placed at the beginning of books.

I would have thee to know, Sancho, that it is the glory of knights-errant to go without eating for a month, and even when they do eat, that it should be of what comes first to hand; and this would hav...

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.

If all, or almost all, the plays that are popular now, imaginative works as well as historical ones, are known to be nonsense and without rhyme or reason, and despite this the mob hears them with plea...

If, for my sins, or by my good fortune, I come across some giant hereabouts, a common occurrence with knights-errant, and overthrow him in one onslaught, or cleave him asunder to the waist, or, in sho...

In Roman times everybody spoke Latin as their mother tongue, yet there must’ve been some morons even then. Speaking Latin didn’t absolve them of stupidity.

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...

In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains g...

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

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 h...

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 dis...

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...

Jehová, que de todos los buenos dioses que han sido adorados por los hombres es ciertamente el más envidioso, el más vanidoso, el más feroz, el más injusto, el más sanguinario, el más déspota y el más...