Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

215 Sourced Quotes

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
"You are a villain and a scoundrel," said Don Quixote, "and you are the one who is vacant and foolish; I have more upstairs than the whore who bore you ever did".

Miguel de Cervantes
All the vices, Sancho, bring some kind of pleasure with them; but envy brings nothing but irritation, bitterness, and rage.

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
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
Urgent necessity prompts many to do things, at the very thoughts of which they perhaps would start at other times.

Miguel de Cervantes
All persons are not discreet enough to know how to take things by the right handle.

Miguel de Cervantes
Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it.

Miguel de Cervantes
When we leave this world, and are laid in the earth, the prince walks as narrow a path as the day-laborer.

Miguel de Cervantes