Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote (1605)

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For if he like a madman lived,
At least he like a wise one died.

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
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
He … got the better of himself, and that's the best kind of victory one can wish for.

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

Miguel de Cervantes
Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.

Miguel de Cervantes
Liberty is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed on man; with it we cannot compare the treasures which the earth contains or the sea conceals; for liberty, as for honor, we can and ought to risk our lives; and, on for the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall man.

Miguel de Cervantes
You're leaping over the hedge before you come to the stile.

Miguel de Cervantes
There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war.

Miguel de Cervantes
My memory is so bad that many times I forget my own name.

Miguel de Cervantes
I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.

Miguel de Cervantes
It is a common proverb, beauteous princess, that diligence is the mother of good fortune.

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 each man say what he chooses; if because of this I am criticized by the ignorant, I shall not be chastised by the learned.

Miguel de Cervantes
If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne.

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

Miguel de Cervantes
In short, virtue cannot live where envy reigns, nor liberality subsist with niggardliness.

Miguel de Cervantes
A knight errant who turns mad for a reason deserves neither merit nor thanks. The thing is to do it without cause.

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

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
I can tell where my own shoe pinches me; and you must not think, sir, to catch old birds with chaff.

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
On the word of a gentleman, and a Christian.

Miguel de Cervantes
There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

Miguel de Cervantes