23 Quotes Tagged: don-quixote

A blessing on those happy ages that did not know the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor is, I feel sure, being rewarded in hell for his diabolical creation, by which he made it possible for an infamous and cowardly hand to take away the life of a brave knight as, in the heat of the courage and resolution that fires and animates the gallant breast, a stray bullet appears, nobody knows how or from where - fired perhaps by some fellow who took fright at the flash of the fiendish contraption, and fled - and in an instant put an end to the life and loves of one who deserved to live for many a long age.

Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move — which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

Come, Death, so subtly veiled that I
Thy coming know not, how or when,
Lest it should give me life again
To find how sweet it is to die.

It is a wise man’s duty to save himself for to-morrow, and not risk everything on one day.

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw — that of outright unreadability.

I don't see what my arse has to do with enchantings!

...if the verses are for a literary competition, your grace should try to win second place; first is always won through favor or because of the high estate of the person, second is won because of pure justice, and by this calculation third becomes second, and the first becomes third...

"By God and upon my conscience", said the devil, "I never observed it, for my mind is occupied with so many different things that I was forgetting the main thing I came about." "This demon must be an honest fellow and a good Christian," said Sancho; "for if he wasn't he wouldn't swear by God and his conscience; I feel sure now there must be good souls even in hell itself."

There is remedy for all things except death - Don Quixote De La Mancha

Me parece que el traducir de una lengua en otra, como no sea de las reinas de las lenguas, griega y latina, es como quien mira los tapices flamencos por el revés; que aunque se ven las figuras, son llenas de hilos que las escurecen, y no se ven con la lisura y tez de la haz.

As you know, I have wealth of my own and do not desire anyone else's; I am free and do not care to submit to another; I do not love or despise anyone. I do not deceive this one or solicit that one; I do not mock one or amuse myself with another. The honest conversation of the shepherdesses from these hamlets, and tending to my goats, are my entertainment. The limits of my desires are these mountains, and if they go beyond here, it is to contemplate the beauty of heaven and the steps whereby the soul travels to its first home.

When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. […] If the same person were to write his autobiography twice, first in one mode and then in the other, the two accounts would be so different that it would be hard to believe that they referred to the same person. In one he would appear as an obsessed creature, a passionate Knight forever serenading Faith or Beauty, humorless and over-life-size; in the other as coolly detached, full of humor and self-mockery, lacking in a capacity for affection, easily bored and smaller than life-size. As Don Quixote seen by Sancho Panza, he never prays; as Sancho Panza seen by Don Quixote, he never giggles.

After the gratifications of brutish appetites are past, the greatest pleasure then is to get rid of that which entertained it.

"How can you say that?" retorted Don Quixote. "Do you not hear the neighing of the horses, the blaring of the trumpets, and the rattling of the drums?"
"All I can hear," replied Sancho, "is lots of sheep bleating."