Top 400 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “When a man says, “Get out of my house! what would you have with my wife?” there is no answer to be made.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

352. “I would do what I pleased, and doing what I pleased, I should have my will, and having my will, I should be contented; and when one is contented, there is no more to be desired; and when there is no more to be desired, there is an end of it.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

353. “Old, that’s an affront no woman can well bear.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

354. “Evil comes not amiss if it comes alone.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

355. “The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

356. “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 Saavedra

357. “Too much sanity may be madness.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

358. “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 Saavedra

359. “Trying to stop slanderers’ tongues is like trying to put gates to the open plain.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

360. “When we are asleep, we are all equal.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

361. “It is by rugged paths like these they go That scale the heights of immortality, Unreached by those that falter here below.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

362. “I can tell where my own shoe pinches me.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

363. “I know what’s what, and have always taken care of the main chance.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

364. “The reputation of a woman may also be compared to a mirror of crystal, shining and bright, but liable to be sullied by every breath that comes near it.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

366. “According to an ancient and common tradition in the kingdom of Great Britain, this king did not die, but was transformed into a raven by the art of enchantment and, in the course of time, he shall return to rule again and regain his kingdom and his scepter.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

367. “God who sends the wound sends the medicine.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

368. “From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

369. “Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticising the works of others.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

370. “Do we know exactly who we are? The more urgently we quest for our authentic selves, the more they tend to recede. The Knight and Sancho, as the great work closes, know exactly who they are, not so much by their adventures as through their marvelous conversations, be they quarrels or exchanges of insights.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

371. “I’ll turn over a new leaf.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

372. “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.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

373. “Whoever is ignorant is vulgar.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

374. “He who reforms, God assists.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

375. “All I know is that so long I am asleep I am rid of all fears and hopes and toils and glory, and long live the man who invented sleep, the cloak that covers all human thirst.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

376. “Let everyone turn himself around, and look at home, and he will find enough to do.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

377. “Abundance, even of good things, prevents them from being valued.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

378. “Tis a dainty thing to command, though ’twere but a flock of sheep.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

379. “But my thoughts ran a wool-gathering; and I did like the countryman, who looked for his ass while he was mounted on his back.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

380. “One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

381. “Since Cervantes’s magnificent Knight’s quest has cosmological scope and reverberation, no object seems beyond reach.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

382. “Mind, Sancho, I do not say that a proverb aptly brought in is objectionable; but to pile up and string together proverbs at random makes conversation dull and vulgar.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

383. “The absent feel and fear every ill.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

384. “This is my friend Durandarte, flower and mirror of the true lovers and valiant knights of his time. He is held enchanted here, as I myself and many others are, by that French enchanter Merlin, who, they say, was the devil’s son; but my belief is, not that he was the devil’s son, but that he knew, as the saying is, a point more than the devil.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

385. “By the one God, Sancho, no more proverbs.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

386. “Let each look to himself and not try to make out white black, and black white; for each of us is as God made him, aye, and often worse.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

387. “Since then the romances of chivalry had been superseded by the flowering of literature that we know as the Spanish Golden Age, and by Cervantes’s time nobody considered them to be a threat any more.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

388. “For let us women be never so ill-favored, I imagine that we are always delighted to hear ourselves called handsome.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

389. “The landlord replied he had no chickens, for the kites had stolen them.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

390. “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.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

391. “And indeed, if the truth is to be told, what I eat in my corner without form or fuss has much more relish for me, even though it be bread and onions, than the turkeys of those other tables where I am forced to chew slowly, drink little, wipe my mouth every minute, and cannot sneeze or cough if I want or do other things that are the privileges of liberty and solitude.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

392. “I had rather munch a crust of brown bread and an onion in a corner, without any more ado, or ceremony, than feed upon turkey at another man’s table.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

393. “Despite all this, we stayed in the hospital that night, and when the old woman found me alone on the grounds she asked, “Is it you, Montiel? Is it you, perchance, my boy?” I lifted my head and looked up at her for a long time. When she saw this, she bent down to me with tears in her eyes and threw her arms around my neck. She would’ve kissed me on the lips if I’d let her, but that was disgusting, and I wouldn’t stand for it.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

394. “My lady the duchess has duennas in her service that might be countesses if it was the will of fortune; ‘but laws go as kings like;’ let nobody speak ill of duennas, above all of ancient maiden ones; for.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

395. “Halt! ill-born rabble, follow him not nor pursue him, or ye will have to reckon with me in battle!”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

396. “No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

397. “So it isn’t the masses who are to blame for demanding rubbish, but rather those who aren’t capable of providing them with anything else.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

398. “When you are at Rome, do as you see.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

399. “Other men’s pains are easily borne.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

400. “Love is invisible, and comes in and goes out as he likes, without anyone calling him to account for what he does.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra