Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.

A great man who is vicious will be a great example of vice and a rich man who is not generous will be merely a miserly beggar, for the possessor of wealth is not made happy by possessing it but by spending it, and not by spending it as he pleases but by knowing how to spend it well.

Tell me thy company, and I'll tell thee what thou art

He who sees a play that is regular, and answerable to the rules of poetry, is pleased with the comic part, informed by the serious, surprised at the variety of accidents, improved by the language, warned by the frauds, instructed by examples, incensed against vice, and enamoured with virtue; for a good play must cause all these emotions in the soul of him that sees it, though he were never so insensible and unpolished.

La buena y verdadera amistad no puede ni debe ser sospechosa de nada.

How is it possible that things so trivial and so easy to remedy can have the power to perplex and absorb an intelligence as mature as yours, and one so ready to demolish and pass over much greater difficulties?

Every tooth in a man’s head is more valuable than a diamond

I betook myself to these solitudes, resolved to end here the life I hated as if it were my mortal enemy. But fate would not rid me of it, contenting itself with robbing me of my reason,

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

(...) porque la mayor locura que puede hacer un hombre en esta vida es dejarse morir sin más ni más, sin que nadie le mate ni otras manos le acaben que las de la melancolía.

There's no taking trout with dry breeches.

Para mí sola nació don Quijote y yo para él; él supo obrar y yo escribir.

...in the worst of circumstances, the hypocrite who pretends to be good does less harm than the public sinner.

Finally, having quite lost his wits, he was seized with the strangest conceit any madman in the world has ever had. It seemed to him that it was requisite and necessary, for the augmentation of his honor and for the benefit of the commonwealth, that he should become a knight-errant and ride throughout the world with his horse and his arms to seek adventures.

But what distressed him greatly was not having another hermit there to confess him and to receive consolation from; and so he solaced himself with pacing up and down the little meadow, and writing and carving on the bark of trees and on the fine sand a multitude of verses all in harmony with his sadness