Top 500 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “All the vices, Sancho, bring some kind of pleasure with them; but envy brings nothing but irritation, bitterness, and rage.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

403. “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?”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

404. “This is a natural disposition of women,” said Don Quixote. “They disdain those who love them and love those who disdain them.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

406. “He who reforms, God assists.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

411. “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

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

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

413. “And yet the power of thought has always been so far beyond us that the main difference between men and animals is: they can think and we can’t.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

415. “At this the duchess, laughing all the while, said: “Sancho Panza is right in all he has said, and will be right in all he shall say...”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

416. “Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

417. “I have vanquished giants, and I have sent villains and malefactors to her, but where can they find her if she has been enchanted and transformed into the ugliest peasant girl anyone can imagine?”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

418. “But what’s that book next to it?” “La Galatea, by Miguel de Cervantes,”24 said the barber. “This Cervantes has been a good friend of mine for many years, and I know that he is better versed in misfortunes than in verses. His book has a certain creativity; it proposes something and concludes nothing. We have to wait for the second part he has promised; perhaps with that addition it will achieve the mercy denied to it now; in the meantime, keep it locked away in your house, my friend.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

419. “Be not under the dominion of thine own will; it is the vice of the ignorant, who vainly presume on their own understanding.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

420. “But to give him anything to drink was impossible, or would have been so had not the landlord bored a reed, and putting one end in his mouth poured the wine into him through the other; all which he bore with patience rather than sever the ribbons of his helmet.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

421. “En fin, yo quiero saber lo que gano, poco o mucho que sea, que sobre un huevo pone la gallina, y muchos pocos hacen un mucho, y mientras se gana algo no se pierde nada.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

422. “Ah, but Senor!” exclaimed the niece, “your Grace should send them to be burned along with the rest; for I shouldn’t wonder at all if my uncle, after he has been cured off this chivalry sickness, reading one of these books, should take it into his head to become a shepherd and go wandering through the woods and meadows singing and piping, or, what is worse, become a poet, which they say is an incurable disease and one that is very catching.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

423. “Your Grace is more fit to be a preacher than a knight-errant,” said Sancho. “Knights-errant.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

424. “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

425. “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

426. “There were but two families in the world, Have-much and Have-little.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

428. “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

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

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

430. “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

431. “He who’s never loved cannot be good.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

432. “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 Saavedra

433. “The great achievement is to lose one’s reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were cause?”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

434. “Nothing flows from her, vile rabble.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

435. “What I can tell your grace is that it deals with truths, and they are truths so appealing and elegant that no lies can equal them.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

436. “Whether thus adorned she would have been beautiful or not, and what she must have been in her prosperity, may be imagined from the beauty remaining to her after so many hardships; for, as everyone knows, the beauty of some women has its times and its seasons, and is increased or diminished by chance causes; and naturally the emotions of the mind will heighten or impair it, though indeed more frequently they totally destroy it.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

437. “We must not stand upon trifles.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

438. “That night the housekeeper burned all the books there were in the stable yard and in all the house; and there must have been some that went up in smoke which should have been preserved in everlasting archives, if the one who did the scrutinizing had not been so indolent. Thus we see the truth of the old saying, to the effect that the innocent must sometimes pay for the sins of the guilty.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

439. “He that will not when he may, When he would, he should have nay.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

440. “Sobre un buen cimiento se puede levantar un buen edificio, y el mejor cimiento y zanja del mundo es el dinero.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

441. “Sancho tried to amuse him and cheer him up by chatting to him, and said, among other things, what is recorded in the next chapter.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

442. “Quien te cubre, te descubre!”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

443. “Countless were the hares ready skinned and the plucked fowls that hung on the trees for burial in the pots, numberless the wildfowl and game of various sorts suspended from the branches that the air might keep them cool. Sancho counted more than sixty wine skins.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

444. “With life many things are remedied.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

445. “What a man has, so much he is sure of.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

446. “It is past all controversy that what costs dearest is, and ought to be, most valued.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

447. “They can expect nothing but their labor for their pains. – Cervantes.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

448. “If you take a good woman into your house it will be an easy matter to keep her good, and even to make her still better; but if you take a bad one you will find it hard work to mend her, for it is no very easy matter to pass from one extreme to another.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

449. “In short, virtue cannot live where envy reigns, nor liberality subsist with niggardliness.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

450. “And so I believe that the sage I have mentioned must, a moment ago, have placed in your thoughts and on your tongue the appellation “The Knight of the Sorry Face”, which is what I propose to call myself from now on; and to ensure that the title suits me all the better, I am resolved to have painted on my coat of arms, at the earliest opportunity, a very sorry face.”

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra