Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

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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
He that will not when he may, When he would, he should have nay.

Miguel de Cervantes
If thou takest virtue for the rule of life, and valuest thyself upon acting in all things comfortably thereto, thou wilt have no cause to envy lords and princes; for blood is inherited, but virtue is common property, and may be acquired by all; it has, moreover, an intrinsic worth, which blood has not.

Miguel de Cervantes
Is it possible your pragmatical worship should not know that the comparisons made between wit and wit, courage and courage, beauty and beauty, birth and birth, are always odious and ill taken?.

Miguel de Cervantes
Be not under the dominion of thine own will; it is the vice of the ignorant, who vainly presume on their own understanding.

Miguel de Cervantes
There is no jewel in the world so valuable as a chaste and virtuous woman.

Miguel de Cervantes
Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth.

Miguel de Cervantes
Fortune may have yet a better success in reserve for you and they who lose today may win tomorrow.

Miguel de Cervantes
For the army is a school in which the miser becomes generous, and the generous prodigal; miserly soldiers are like monsters, but very rarely seen.

Miguel de Cervantes
I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.

Miguel de Cervantes
The painter Orbaneja of Ubeda, if he chanced to draw a cock, he wrote under it, "This is a cock," lest the people should take it for a fox.

Miguel de Cervantes
It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.

Miguel de Cervantes
He's [Don Quixote's] a muddled fool, full of lucid intervals.

Miguel de Cervantes
[To] turn poet, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

Miguel de Cervantes
'Tis ill talking of halters in the house of a man that was hanged.

Miguel de Cervantes
At this the duchess, laughing all the while, said: "Sancho Panza is right in all he has said, and will be right in all he shall say...

Miguel de Cervantes
The charging of his enemy was but the work of a moment.

Miguel de Cervantes
Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as oil does above water.

Miguel de Cervantes
No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.

Miguel de Cervantes
There is a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us out flat some time or other.

Miguel de Cervantes
When good luck knocks at the door, let him in and keep him there.

Miguel de Cervantes
How will he who does not know how to govern himself know how to govern others?

Miguel de Cervantes
The beginning of health lies in knowing the disease and in the sick man's willingness to take the medicines which the physician prescribes...

Miguel de Cervantes
There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.

Miguel de Cervantes
But do not give it to a lawyer's clerk to write, for they use a legal hand that Satan himself will not understand.

Miguel de Cervantes