Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

215 Sourced Quotes

It is better that a judge should lean on the side of compassion than severity.

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

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

Miguel de Cervantes
I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

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

Miguel de Cervantes
When the head aches, all the members partake of the pains.

Miguel de Cervantes
There are two kinds of beauty, one being of the soul and the other of the body, That of the soul is revealed through intelligence, modesty, right conduct, Generosity and good breeding, all of which qualities may exist in an ugly man; And when one's gaze is fixed upon beauty of this sort and not upon that of the body, Love is usually born suddenly and violently.

Miguel de Cervantes
For a man to attain to an eminent degree in learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness in the stomach, and other inconveniences.

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

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
'Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it....

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

Miguel de Cervantes
For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.

Miguel de Cervantes
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
Give me but that, and let the world rub; there I'll stick.

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
A private sin is not so prejudicial in this world as a public indecency.

Miguel de Cervantes
'Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o'er the pate, or a kick of the guts; to go out like the snuff of a farthing candle, and die merely of the mulligrubs, or the sullens.

Miguel de Cervantes
Remember the old saying, "Faint heart ne'er won fair lady."

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
Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies.

Miguel de Cervantes
The lore I learned when I was a shepherd tells me it cannot want three hours of dawn now, because the mouth of the Horn is overhead and makes midnight in the line of the left arm.

Miguel de Cervantes
You are a devil at everything, and there is no kind of thing in the 'versal world but what you can turn your hand to.

Miguel de Cervantes
Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness — its opposite — never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.

Miguel de Cervantes