Cervantes Saavedra Quotes (49 Quotes)

I find my familiarity with thee has bred contempt.

It is bad judgment to speak of halters in the house of a man who was hanged

God who sends the wound sends the medicine.

Didn't I tell you, Don Quixote, sir, to turn back, for they were not armies you were going to attack, but flocks of sheep.

It is not the hand, but the understanding of a man, that may be said to write

In hell there is no retention.

Make yourself honey and the flies will devour you.

The stomach carries the heart, and not the heart the stomach.

If that should not be, cousin, I say patience and shuffle the cards.

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.

You are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch in his throne.

In me the need to talk is a primary impulse, and I can't help saying right off what comes to my tongue.

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 oer 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.

Who doesn't know how to enjoy luck when it comes, should not complain when it passes him by

I had rather munch a crust of brown bread and an onion in a corner, without any more ado or ceremony, than feed upon turkey at another mans table, where one is fain to sit mincing and chewing his meat an hour together, drink little, be always wiping his fingers and his chops, and never dare to cough nor sneeze, though he has never so much a mind to it, nor do a many things which a body may do freely by ones self.

And the first thing I would do in my government, I would have nobody to control me, I would be absolute and who but I now, he that is absolute, can do what he likes he that can do what he likes, can take his pleasure he that can take his pleasure

There is no book so bad, said the bachelor, but something good may be found in it.

I never thrust my nose into other men's porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine Every man for himself and God for us all.

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

History is a sacred kind of writing, because truth is essential to it, and where truth is, there God himself is, so far as truth is concerned

Patience and shuffle the cards.

When a man says Get out of my house what would you have with my wife there's no answer to be made.

Never meddle with play-actors, for they're a favoured race.

A man must eat a peck of salt with his friend, before he knows him.

The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite revive from ashes and rise.

If I had a water thirst,' replied Sancho, there are wells on the road where I could have quenched it.'

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.

Hold you there, neither a strange hand nor my own, neither heavy nor light shall touch my bum.

All that glisters is not gold.

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

My grandma (rest her soul) used to say, ''there were but two families in the world, have-much and have-little.''

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.

I know who I am, and I know too that I am capable of being not only the characters I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France, and all the Nine Worthies as well.

A woman's advice has little value, but he who won't take it is a fool.

The worst reconciliation is better than the best divorce

God bless the inventor of sleep, the cloak that covers all men's thoughts, the food that cures all hunger . . . the balancing weight that levels the shepherd with the king and the simple with the wise.

All the physicians and authors in the world could not give a clear account of his madness. He is mad in patches, full of lucid intervals.

I hate to keep things long in case they go mouldy from over-keeping.

Fortune sometimes turns round like a mill wheel and he who was yesterday at the top lies today at the bottom

Without a governorship you came out of your mother's womb, without a governorship you've lived to this day, and without a governorship you'll go - or they'll take you - to the grave.

Every one is as God made him, and often a great deal worse.

Poetry, good sir, in my opinion, is like a tender virgin, very young, and extremely beautiful, whom divers others virgins - namely, all the other sciences - make it their business to enrich, polish and adorn and to her it belongs to make use of them

She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being

Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it

Love in young men for the most part is not love but sexual desire, and its accomplishment is the end.

Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.

Oh, sir, sir, there are more tricks done in the village than make a noise - saving her ladyship's presence.

Delay always heeds danger.

An honest man's word is as good as his bond.