Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote (1605)

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It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.

Miguel de Cervantes
One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

Miguel de Cervantes
Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.

Miguel de Cervantes
The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of his own works.

Miguel de Cervantes
Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

Miguel de Cervantes
There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.

Miguel de Cervantes
Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
They had best not stir the rice, though it sticks to the pot.

Miguel de Cervantes
Time ripens all things. No man is born wise. Bishops are made of men and not of stones.

Miguel de Cervantes
You cannot eat your cake and have your cake; 48 and store 's no sore.

Miguel de Cervantes
When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

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
Sancho Panza by name, is my own self, if I was not changed in my cradle.

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

Miguel de Cervantes
I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to base fellows is like throwing water into the sea.

Miguel de Cervantes