Don Quixote Quotes - Page 3 | Just Great DataBase

A good joke, that!" returned Don Quixote. "Books that have been printed with the king's licence, and with the approbation of those to whom they have been submitted, and read with universal delight, and extolled by great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, gentle and simple, in a word by people of every sort, of whatever rank or condition they may be—that these should be lies!

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

Love and war are exactly alike. It is lawful to use tricks and slights to obtain a desired end.

So he went on stringing together these and other absurdities, all in the style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language as well as he could; and all the while he rode so slowly and the sun mounted so rapidly and with such fervour that it was enough to melt his brains if he had any.

This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

That is the natural disposition of the sex; to disdain those who adore them, and love those by whom they are abhorred.

This is a fault incident to all those who presume to translate books of verse into another language. For, however much care they take and however much ability they employ, they can never equal the quality of the original.

[He] is not going to exit to applause, even if the entire human race should favor him.

I have vanquished giants, and I have sent villains and malefactors to her, but where can they find her if she has been enchanted and transformed into the ugliest peasant girl anyone can imagine?

Nothing flows from her, vile rabble.

Trying to stop slanderers' tongues is like trying to put gates to the open plain.

Thus we see the truth of the old saying, to the effect that the innocent must sometimes pay for the sins of the guilty.

And so, having polished up his armor and made the morion over into a closed helmet, and having given himself and his horse a name, he naturally found but one thing lacking still: he must seek out a lady of whom he could become enamored; for a knight-errant without a lady-love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul.

This is my friend Durandarte, flower and mirror of the true lovers and valiant knights of his time. He is held enchanted here, as I myself and many others are, by that French enchanter Merlin, who, they say, was the devil's son; but my belief is, not that he was the devil's son, but that he knew, as the saying is, a point more than the devil.

He who clipped us has kept the scissors.

By God, master," said Sancho, "the island that I cannot govern with the years I have, I'll not be able to govern with the years of Methuselah; the difficulty is that the said island keeps its distance somewhere, I know not where; and not that there is any want of head in me to govern it.

Since then the romances of chivalry had been superseded by the flowering of literature that we know as the Spanish Golden Age, and by Cervantes’s time nobody considered them to be a threat any more.

Sancho tried to amuse him and cheer him up by chatting to him, and said, among other things, what is recorded in the next chapter.

He robbed him of a great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn books written in verse into another language, for, with all the pains they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the level of the originals as they were first produced.

Sancho, when a man knows not how to read, or is left-handed, it argues one of two things; either that he was the son of exceedingly mean and lowly parents, or that he himself was so incorrigible and ill-conditioned that neither good company nor good teaching could make any impression on him.

Happy the age, happy the time, to which the ancients gave the name of golden, not because in that fortunate age the gold so coveted in this our iron one was gained without toil, but because they that lived in it knew not the two words "mine" and "thine"!

Knight of the Ill-Favored Face.

Now, tell me which is the greater deed, raising a dead man or killing a giant? The answer is self-evident, responded Don Quixote. It is greater to raise a dead man.

Halt! ill-born rabble, follow him not nor pursue him, or ye will have to reckon with me in battle!

I've always heard the old folks say that if you don't know how to enjoy good luck when it comes, you shouldn't complain if it passes you by.

Was that not the great mission he had undertaken in the world—to revive the spirit of chivalry?

It seems to me a hard case to make slaves of those whom God and nature have made free.

But I'll take you, Don Clown stuffed with garlic," said Don Quixote, "and tie you to a tree as naked as when your mother brought you forth, and give you, not to say three thousand three hundred, but six thousand six hundred lashes, and so well laid on that they won't be got rid of if you try three thousand three hundred times; don't answer me a word or I'll tear your soul out." On

You should know, Sancho, that a man is not worth more than any other if he does not do more than any other.

The best sauce in the world is hunger, and as the poor are never without that, they always eat with a relish.

To give expression to humour, and write in a strain of graceful pleasantry, is the gift of great geniuses. The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one.

...‘One of the faults that have been found in this history,’ said the young graduate, ‘is that the author included a tale called Inappropriate Curiosity; not that it’s a bad one or badly told, but it’s out of place and has nothing to do with the history of the great Don Quixote.’‘I bet,’ replied Sancho, ‘that the bastard’s gone and made a right old hotchpotch.’‘I do now have to say,’ said Don Quixote, ‘that the author of my history is no sage but some ignorant prattler...'– Rutherford translation

Dame Fortune once upon a day   To me was bountiful and kind;   But all things change; she changed her mind, And what she gave she took away. O Fortune, long I've sued to thee;   The gifts thou gavest me restore,   For, trust me, I would ask no more, Could 'was' become an 'is' for me.

It is never my custom to plunder those I over come.

Another thing to strive for: reading your history should move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it.