Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote (1605)

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Do but take care to express yourself in a plain, easy Manner, in well-chosen, significant and decent Terms, and to give a harmonious and pleasing Turn to your Periods: study to explain your Thoughts, and set them in the truest Light, labouring as much as possible, not to leave them dark nor intricate, but clear and intelligible.

Miguel de Cervantes
I follow a more easy, and, in my opinion, a wiser course, namely--to inveigh against the levity of the female sex, their fickleness, their double-dealing, their rotten promises, their broken faith, and, finally, their want of judgment in bestowing their affections.

Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning, indicating a sound body and a mind free from care; but his master, being unable to sleep himself awakened him, saying, "I am amazed, Sancho, at the torpor of thy soul; it seems as if thou wert made of marble or brass, insensible of emotion or sentiment!...

Miguel de Cervantes
Happy the man to whom heaven has given a morsel of bread without laying him under the obligation of thanking any other for it than heaven itself.

Miguel de Cervantes
Blessed be those happy ages that were strangers to the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor I am satisfied is now in Hell, receiving the reward of his cursed invention, which is the cause that very often a cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman.

Miguel de Cervantes
Riches are of little avail in many of the calamities to which mankind are liable.

Miguel de Cervantes
Experience itself, the mother of all the sciences.

Miguel de Cervantes
Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticising the works of others.

Miguel de Cervantes
No man is more than another unless he does more than another.

Miguel de Cervantes
Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for a single knight attacks you.

Miguel de Cervantes
By God and upon my conscience, said the devil, I never observed it, for my mind is occupied with so many different things that I was forgetting the main thing I came about. This demon must be an honest fellow and a good Christian, said Sancho; for if he wasn't he wouldn't swear by God and his conscience; I feel sure now there must be good souls even in hell itself.

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
There is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain which death does not remove.

Miguel de Cervantes
Does the devil possess you? You're leaping over the hedge before you come at the stile.

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

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

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

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

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

Miguel de Cervantes
I must speak the truth, and nothing but the truth.

Miguel de Cervantes