Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

215 Sourced Quotes

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
Whether the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it goes ill with the pitcher.

Miguel de Cervantes
Do not eat garlic or onions; for their smell will reveal that you are a peasant.

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

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
Tis a dainty thing to command, though 'twere but a flock of sheep.

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
We ought to love our Maker for His own sake, without either hope of good or fear of pain.

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

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

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
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