Don Quixote Quotes

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it.

There were no embraces, because where there is great love there is often little display of it.

Thou hast seen nothing yet.

For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.

Hunger is the best sauce in the world.

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

What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?

I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.

... he who's down one day can be up the next, unless he really wants to stay in bed, that is...

Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.

Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed.

It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.

The wounds received in battle bestow honor, they do not take it away...

Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.

Wit and humor do not reside in slow minds.

...for hope is always born at the same time as love...

A tooth is much more to be prized than a diamond.

The most perceptive character in a play is the fool, because the man who wishes to seem simple cannot possibly be a simpleton.

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.

Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.

What intelligent things you say sometimes ! One would think you had studied.

A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty.

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.

She wanted, with her fickleness, to make my destruction constant; I want, by trying to destroy myself, to satisfy her desire.

...without intelligence, there can be no humour.

What is more dangerous than to become a poet? which is, as some say, an incurable and infectious disease.

The fault lies not with the mob, who demands nonsense, but with those who do not know how to produce anything else.

Where envy reigns virtue can't exist, and generosity doesn't go with meanness.

... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.

Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred.

In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.

Woman is made of fragile glass;but do not put her to the testto see if she will break,for that might come to pass.She is too apt to shatter,and wisdom is surely endedif what can ne'er be mendedis put in the way of danger.What I say to you is true,and let us all agree :wherever Danae may be,showers of gold are there, too.

For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.

To dream the impossible dream, that is my quest.

...you are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch on his throne.

One man is no more than another, if he do no more than what another does.

So it isn’t the masses who are to blame for demanding rubbish, but rather those who aren’t capable of providing them with anything else.

Sancho, just as you want people to believe what you have seen in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. And that is all I have to say.

Where one door shuts, another opens.

What covers you discovers you.

The reason of the unreasonableness which against my reason is wrought, doth so weaken my reason, as with all reason I do justly complain on your beauty.

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...

By the Blessed Virgin ! Is it possible that your grace is so thickheaded and so short on brains that you cannot see that what I'm telling you is the absolute truth.

Consider, that no jewel upon earth is comparable to a woman of virtue and honor; and, that the honor of the sex consists in the fair characters they maintain.

I’m a peaceful, mild, and quiet man, and I know how to conceal any insult because I have a wife and children to support and care for.

My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of chivalry cast over it. Now I see through their absurdities and deceptions, and it only grieves me that this destruction of my illusions has come so late that it leaves me no time to make some amends by reading other books that might be a light to my soul.

Rocinante felt the desire to pleasure himself with the ladies, and as soon as he picked up their scent he abandoned his natural ways and customs, did not ask permission of his owner, broke into a brisk little trot, and went off to communicate his need to them.