Top 500 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “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 Saavedra

152. “Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as does oil above water.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

153. “Great persons are able to do great kindnesses.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

154. “Don Quixote did not sleep at all that night but thought of his lady Dulcinea, in order to conform to what he had read in his books of knights spending many sleepless nights in groves and meadows, turning all their thoughts to memories of their ladies.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

155. “There’s no love lost between us.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

156. “For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

157. “A shy face is better than a forward heart.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

158. “Blessings on him, who invented sleep.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

159. “Can we ever have too much of a good thing?”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

160. “Comparisons are odious.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

161. “Give the devil his due.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

162. “It is a true saying that a man must eat a peck of salt with his friend before he knows him.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

163. “Make yourself honey and the flies will devour you.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

164. “But do not give it to a lawyer’s clerk to write, for they use a legal hand that Satan himself will not understand.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

165. “The ass bears the load, but not the overload.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

166. “Don’t put too fine a point to your wit for fear it should get blunted.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

167. “Never meddle with play-actors, for they’re a favoured race.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

168. “All women are good – good for nothing, or good for something.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

169. “Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

170. “Quis talia fando temperet a lacrymis?”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

171. “The treason pleases, but the traitors are odious.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

172. “Well, now there’s a remedy for everything except death.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

173. “That’s the nature of women, not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

174. “Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

175. “Every man is the son of his own works.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

176. “Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for a single knight attacks you.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

177. “Soul of fibre and heart of oak.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

178. “Dine on little, and sup on less.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

179. “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.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

180. “History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

181. “The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the sum of his own works.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

182. “My heart is wax molded as she pleases, but enduring as marble to retain.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

183. “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.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

184. “Let us forget and forgive injuries.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

185. “The good governor should have a broken leg and keep at home.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

186. “A private sin is not so prejudicial in this world, as a public indecency.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

187. “Drink moderately, for drunkeness neither keeps a secret, nor observes a promise.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

188. “It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

189. “One swallow alone does not make a summer.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

190. “I’m a peaceful, mild, and quiet man, and I know how to conceal any insult because I have a wife and children to support and care for.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

191. “The woman who is resolved to be respected can make herself be so even amidst an army of soldiers.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

192. “Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep. It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

193. “Get out of harms way.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

194. “The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

195. “Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

196. “Troubles take wing for the man who can sing.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

197. “Great expectations are better than a poor possession.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

198. “It will be seen in the frying of the eggs.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

199. “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!”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

200. “Laughter distances us from that which is ugly and therefore potentially distressing, and indeed enables us to obtain paradoxical pleasure and therapeutic benefit from it.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra