Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

215 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Miguel de Cervantes
The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of his own works.

Miguel de Cervantes
One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

Miguel de Cervantes
It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.

Miguel de Cervantes
Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

Miguel de Cervantes
Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.

Miguel de Cervantes
Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

Miguel de Cervantes
Since Don Quixote de la Mancha is a crazy fool and a madman, and since Sancho Panza, his squire, knows it, yet, for all that, serves and follows him, and hangs on these empty promises of his, there can be no doubt that he is more of a madman and a fool than his master.

Miguel de Cervantes
Sancho Panza by name, is my own self, if I was not changed in my cradle.

Miguel de Cervantes
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.

Miguel de Cervantes
When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

Miguel de Cervantes
You cannot eat your cake and have your cake; 48 and store 's no sore.

Miguel de Cervantes
Time ripens all things. No man is born wise. Bishops are made of men and not of stones.

Miguel de Cervantes
They had best not stir the rice, though it sticks to the pot.

Miguel de Cervantes
He has done like Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, who, being asked what he painted, answered, "As it may hit;" and when he had scrawled out a misshapen cock, was forced to write underneath, in Gothic letters, "This is a cock."

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

Miguel de Cervantes
I never saw a more dreadful battle in my born days.

Miguel de Cervantes
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.

Miguel de Cervantes
Don't put too fine a point to your wit for fear it should get blunted.

Miguel de Cervantes
Let me leap out of the frying-pan into the fire; or, out of God's blessing into the warm sun.

Miguel de Cervantes
But if you build your life on dreams it's prudent to recall; a man with moonlight in his hands has nothing there at all.

Miguel de Cervantes
Now, blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.

Miguel de Cervantes
I don't know that ever I saw one in my born days.

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

Miguel de Cervantes