Miguel de Cervantes famous quotes

Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Money

One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Inspirational #Courage #Stars

Good actions ennoble us, and we are the sons of our deeds.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Son #Literature #Deeds

'Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it....
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Love #Running #Morning

In every case, the remedy is to take action. Get clear about exactly what it is that you need to learn and exactly what you need to do to learn it. BEING CLEAR KILLS FEAR. Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Fear #Needs #World

Delay always breeds danger.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Anger #Delay #Danger

Drink moderately, for drunkeness neither keeps a secret, nor observes a promise.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Promise #Secret #Literature

A closed mouth catches no flies.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Mouths

Thou hast seen nothing yet.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Optimistic #Literature

All sorrows are less with bread.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Food #Sorrow #Bread

The wounds received in battle bestow honor, they do not take it away...
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Honor #Battle #Wounds

He who sings frightens away his ills.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Happiness

Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Inspirational #Life #Hope

It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Discipline #Literature #Praise

A knight errant who turns mad for a reason deserves neither merit nor thanks. The thing is to do it without cause
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Knights #Mad #Causes

Truth indeed rather alleviates than hurts, and will always bear up against falsehood, as oil does above water.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Inspirational #Hurt #Truth

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

#Trying #Desire #Want

Thou camest out of thy mother's belly without government, thou hast liv'd hitherto without government, and thou mayst be carried to thy long home without government, when it shall please the Lord. How many people in this world live without government, yet do well enough, and are well look'd upon?
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Mother #Home #Government

Comparisons are odious.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Guidance #Standards #Comparison

A tooth is much more to be prized than a diamond.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Teeth #Diamond

Tell me what company thou keepst, and I'll tell thee what thou art.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Friendship #Art #Thee

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.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Queens #Latin #Color

Well, there's a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Funny #Death #Wells

I believe there's no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Mother #Believe #Literature

A bad year and a bad month to all the backbiting ***** in the world!...
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Years #Months #World

There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Book #Doe

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Inspirational #World #Lessons

A Man Without Honor is Worse than Dead.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Men #Honor

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

#Character #Men #Simple

When one door is shut, another opens.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Positive #Doors

The man who is prepared has his battle half fought.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Men #Battle #Half

The pen is the tongue of the soul; as are the thoughts engendered there, so will be the things written.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Writing #Soul #Tongue

Where one door shuts another opens.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Opportunity #Doors

Every tooth in a man's head is more valuable than a diamond.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Men #Teeth #Fairy

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Book #Writing #Men

The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Hope #Sky #Wings

Captivity is the greatest of all evils that can befall one.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Evil #Slavery #Captivity

Jealousy sees things always with magnifying glasses which make little things large, of dwarfs giants, of suspicions truths.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Emotional #Glasses #Giants

The pen is the tongue of the mind.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Writing #Mind #Tongue

Great persons are able to do great kindnesses.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Kindness #Able #Great Person

He who gives early gives twice.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Giving #Charity

I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Drinking #Sometimes #Drink

The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Character #Play #Acting

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Business #Causes

There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Pain #Remembrance #Doe

It is a true saying that a man must eat a peck of salt with his friend before he knows him.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Men #Salt

Laziness never arrived at the attainment of a good wish.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Wish #Laziness #Good Wishes

I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to base fellows is like throwing water into the sea.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Sea #Water #Atheism

Truth will rise above falsehood as oil above water.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Truth #Oil #Water

Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Creativity #Procrastination #Design

Fear has many eyes and can see things underground.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Fear #Halloween #Eye

Fair and softly goes far.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Compassion #Literature #Fairness

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Mother #Children #Father

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.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Hands #Long #Evil

Wit and humor do not reside in slow minds.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Mind #Wit

The eyes those silent tongues of love.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Love #Eye #Tongue

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Music #Soul #Jars

Every man is the son of his own works.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Son #Acceptance #Men

Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Wisdom #Wicked #Virtue

I do not insist," answered Don Quixote, "that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Adventure #Way

Valor lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Lying #Literature #Cowardice

It is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not to venture all his eggs in one basket.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Wise #Wisdom #Men

They who lose today may win tomorrow.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Winning #Today #May

Be slow of tongue and quick of eye.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Eye #Tongue #Caution

Time ripens all things; no man is born wise.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Life #Wise #Wisdom

The stomach carries the heart, and not the heart the stomach.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Heart #Eating #Stomach

Experience is the universal mother of sciences.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Mother #Experience

It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Happiness #Laughter #Joy

Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Love #War #Love And War

We ought to love our Maker for His own sake, without either hope of good or fear of pain.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#God #Pain #Sake

Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Belief #Made #Deals

You are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch in his throne.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Kings #Home #Thrones

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

#Innovation #Language #Adopted

True valor lies between cowardice and rashness.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Lying #Cowardice #Valor

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

#Inspirational #Life #Friendship

One of the effects of fear is to disturb the senses and cause things to appear other than what they are.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Causes

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Life And Love #Creativity #Order

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Beauty #Mother #Children

Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Self Esteem #Enemy #Literature

That's the nature of women, not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Women

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Inspirational #Wisdom #Long

Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Military #Victory #Half

No man is more than another unless he does more than another.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Men #Doe

What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Sex #Men #Mind

For a man to attain to an eminent degree in learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness in the stomach, and other inconveniences.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Inspirational #Funny #Graduation

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

#Mother #Perseverance #Men

I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Who I Am #Choices #May

Be a terror to the butchers, that they may be fair in their weight; and keep hucksters and fraudulent dealers in awe, for the same reason.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Fear #Integrity #Literature

When God sends the dawn, he sends it for all.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#God #Dawn

God who gives the wound gives the salve.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#God #Giving #Wounds

Whom God loves, his house is sweet to him.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Sweet #House #God Love

Old, that's an affront no woman can well bear.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Women #Bears #Affront

The treason pleases, but the traitors are odious.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Traitor #Treason #Please

Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Pieces #Sides #Language

I can tell where my own shoe pinches me.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Shoes

Little said is soon amended.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Littles #Said

Laws that only threaten, and are not kept, become like the log that was given to the frogs to be their king, which they feared at first, but soon scorned and trampled on.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Kings #Law #Frogs

Necessity urges desperate measures.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Desperate

You cannot eat your cake and have your cake.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Cake #Miscellaneous

Lovers are commonly industrious to make themselves uneasy.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

#Lovers #Uneasy #Industrious