Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

215 Sourced Quotes

Blessings on him who invented sleep, the mantle that covers all human thoughts, the food that satisfies hunger, the drink that slakes thirst, the fire that warms cold, the cold that moderates heat, and, lastly, the common currency that buys all things, the balance and weight that equalizes the shepherd and the king, the simpleton and the sage.

Miguel de Cervantes
The ass will carry his load, but not a double load; ride not a free horse to death.

Miguel de Cervantes
Love and War are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.

Miguel de Cervantes
Take care, your worship, those things over there are not giants but windmills.

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
Pray look better, Sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

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

Miguel de Cervantes
I was ever charitable and good to the poor, and scorn to take the bread out of another man's mouth. On the other side, by our Lady, they shall play me no foul play. I am an old cur at a crust, and can sleep dog-sleep when I list. I can look sharp as well as another, and let me alone to keep the cobwebs out of my eyes. I know where the shoe wrings me. I will know who and who is together. Honesty is the best policy, I will stick to that. The good shall have my hand and heart, but the bad neither foot nor fellowship. And in my mind, the main point of governing, is to make a good beginning.

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

Miguel de Cervantes
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
From pro's and con's they fell to a warmer way of disputing.

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

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

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

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

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
Does the devil possess you? You're leaping over the hedge before you come at the stile.

Miguel de Cervantes
There is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain which death does not remove.

Miguel de Cervantes
Laws that only threaten, and are not kept, become like the log that was given to the frogs to be their king, which they feared at first, but soon scorned and trampled on.

Miguel de Cervantes
For men may prove and use their friends, as the poet expresses it, usque ad aras, meaning that a friend should not be required to act contrary to the law of God.

Miguel de Cervantes