Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

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

That which costs little is less valued.

Her father guarded her, and she guarded herself; for there are no padlocks, bolts, or bars, that secure a maiden better than her own reserve.

To think that the affairs of this life always remain in the same state is a vain presumption; indeed they all seem to be perpetually changing and moving in a circular course. Spring is followed by summer, summer by autumn, and autumn by winter, which is again followed by spring, and so time continues its everlasting round. But the life of man is ever racing to its end, swifter than time itself, without hope of renewal, unless in the next that is limitless and infinite.

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?.

Time ripens all things; no man is born wise.

And for the citation of so many authors, 'tis the easiest thing in nature. Find out one of these books with an alphabetical index, and without any farther ceremony, remove it verbatim into your own... there are fools enough to be thus drawn into an opinion of the work; at least, such a flourishing train of attendants will give your book a fashionable air, and recommend it for sale.

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

The knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity.

Lovers are commonly industrious to make themselves uneasy.

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.

Seek for good, but expect evil.

You are a devil at everything, and there is no kind of thing in the 'versal world but what you can turn your hand into.

There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.

What is bought is cheaper than a gift.

Honesty's the best policy.

In the night all cats are gray.

No man is more than another unless he does more than another.

There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things.

They can expect nothing but their labor for their pains. - Cervantes

Man have to have friends even in hell.

Old, that's an affront no woman can well bear.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

It will be seen in the frying of the eggs.

The reason for the unreason with which you treat my reason , so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.

Good painter imitates nature, bad ones spews it up.

By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.

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

Roque...lined his men up and had them produce all the clothing, jewels, money, and other objects that they had stolen since the last time they had divided the spoils. Having made a hasty appraisal and reduced to terms of money those items that could not be divided, he split the whole into shares with such equity and exactitude that in not a single instance did he go beyond or fall short of a strict distributive justice. They were all well satisfied with the payment received, indeed they were quite well pleased; and Roque then turned to Don Quixote.

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.

Until death it is all life.

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly.

Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable

History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.

When we leave this world, and are laid in the earth, the prince walks as narrow a path as the day-laborer.

He is mad past recovery, but yet he has lucid intervals.

Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.

There is no jewel in the world so valuable as a chaste and virtuous woman.

One should not talk of hatters in the house of the hanged.

Every one in his own house and God in all of them.

The proof of the pudding is the eating.

There is no love lost between us.

There's no sauce in the world like hunger.

Folly is wont to have more followers and comrades than discretion.

A stout heart breaks bad luck.

He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.

When the head aches, all the members partake of the pain.

Too much sanity may be madness!