Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish Novelist)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet, and dramatist. He is widely regarded as not only the greatest writer in the Spanish language but also as one of the world’s pre-eminent novelists. His masterpiece Don Quixote has been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible.

Born in Alcalá de Henares near Madrid, Cervantes became a highly committed professional soldier. His patriotic career included fighting at the Battle of Lepanto (1571,) where he was wounded and lost for life the use of his left hand. Pirates took him in 1575, and he spent five years as a prisoner at Algiers. Subsequently, he served as a government agent who, desperately struggling to earn a living, turned to write plays and romances.

Cervantes’s first attempt at fiction was a pastoral romance La Galatea (1585,) which was followed by his masterpiece, Don Quixote—published in two volumes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) is an excellent archetype of Western fiction: the unlikely hero—an impoverished country gentleman—who goes mad from reading too much and decides to put the world to rights by becoming a knight-errant.

The first part of Don Quixote was published to immediate Spanish acclaim in 1605. However, Cervantes made many powerful enemies among those who worried that Quixote was a satire of themselves. Cervantes died one year after publishing Part 2 in 1615, just one day before Shakespeare died.

By the 19th century, Don Quixote was no longer viewed as a comic novel, but instead as a philosophical one devoted to uncovering the nature of human identity in the battle between self and society. Cervantes’s synthesis of the epic and dramatic genres into a new form that evolved into the modern novel, and the characters that he created, along with their obsessions, have entered the deepest level of our culture. Don Quixote was revered by such writers as Laurence Sterne, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, and Herman Melville.

Cervantes’s other works include two surviving plays and a collection of short stories, Novelas Ejemplares (1613; Exemplary Stories) and a tale of adventure, Persiles y Sigismunda, published posthumously in 1617.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Miguel de Cervantes

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

Every one is the son of his own works.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Character, Work

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
Topics: Perseverance, Idleness, Persistence, Fortune, Wishes

‘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
Topics: Love

Mere flimflam stories, and nothing but shams and lies.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Vanity

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Lawyers, Law

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Service, Servants

A private sin is not so prejudicial in this world, as a public indecency.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Sin

Valour lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Risk, Prudence, Safety, Courage

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world. Yet from this lesson thou will learn to avoid the frog’s foolish ambition of swelling to rival the bigness of the ox.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Self Respect

He preaches well that lives well.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Preaching, Evangelism, Living

Unseasonable mirth always turns to sorrow.
—Miguel de Cervantes

He who sings frightens away his ills.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Singing

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
Topics: Weight

Good actions ennoble us, and we are the sons of our own deeds.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Action, Deeds

One shouldn’t talk of halters in the hanged man’s house.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Tact

Jests that give pains are no jests.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Humor

A blot in thy escutcheon to all futurity.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: History, Posterity

The knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Vanity

Sloth never arrived at the attainment of a good wish.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Laziness

One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Endurance

A person dishonored is worst than dead.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Honor

All sorrows are less with bread.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Eating

It is impossible for good or evil to last forever; and hence it follows that the evil having lasted so long, the good must be now nigh at hand.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Goodness

‘Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o’er the pate, or a kick of the guts; to go out like the snuff of a farthing candle, and die merely of the mulligrubs, or the sullens.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Death, Dying

Be brief, for no talk can please when too long. Being prepared is half the victory.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Victory

I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom, Proverbs

No padlock, bolts, or bars can secure a maiden so well as her own reserve.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Discipline, Maidenhood

To be prepared is half the victory.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Planning

To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action when there is more reason to fear than to hope. ‘Tis the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Caution

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