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
No man is more than another unless he does more than another.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Service
A private sin is not so prejudicial in this world, as a public indecency.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Sin
Fortune always leaves some door open in disasters whereby to come at a remedy.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Fortune
Drink moderately, for drunkenness neither keeps a secret, nor observes a promise
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Drinking
Good actions ennoble us, and we are the sons of our own deeds.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Action, Deeds
When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Law, Lawyers
My grandma (rest her soul) used to say, “There were but two families in the world, have-much and have-little.”
—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
Better a blush on the face than a blot on the heart.
—Miguel de Cervantes
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
Topics: Hope
One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Servants, Service
Absence—that common cure of love.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Absence
Liberty-is one of the choicest gifts that heaven hath bestowed upon man, and exceeds in volume all the treasures which the earth contains within its bosom or the sea covers. Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it, life in insupportable.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Liberty
She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Life
Be slow of tongue and quick of eye.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Caution
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
Every man is as heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Creation
Sorrow was made for man, not for beasts; yet if men encourage melancholy too much, they become no better than beasts.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Sorrow
‘Tis the only comfort of the miserable to have partners in their woes.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Misery, Money
Too much sanity may be madness. But maddest of all, to see life as it is, and not as it should be.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Vision
There’s no taking trout with dry breeches.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Effort
Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a clown; all’s fish that comes to his net; he throws at all, and sweeps stakes; he’s no mower that takes a nap at noon-day, but drives on, fair weather or foul, and cuts down the green grass as well as the ripe corn: he’s neither squeamish nor queesy-stomach d, for he swallows without chewing, and crams down all things into his ungracious maw; and you can see no belly he has, he has a confounded dropsy, and thirsts after men’s lives, which he gurgles down like mother’s milk.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Death, Dying
Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Hope
Do but take care to express yourself in a plain, easy Manner, in well-chosen, significant and decent Terms, and to give a harmonious and pleasing Turn to your Periods: study to explain your Thoughts, and set them in the truest Light, labouring as much as possible, not to leave them dark nor intricate, but clear and intelligible.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Communication
‘Tis ill talking of halters in the house of a man that was hanged.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Tact
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
Topics: Death, Dying
There is a strange charm in the thoughts of a good legacy, or the hopes of an estate, which wondrously removes or at least alleviates the sorrow that men would otherwise feel for the death of friends.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Inheritance
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
Topics: Education, Learning
Hold you there, neither a strange hand nor my own, neither heavy nor light shall touch my bum.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Punishment
Those who’ll play with cats must expect to be scratched.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Expectations, Proverbs, Cats, Danger
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Lope de Vega Spanish Playwright
Miguel de Unamuno Spanish Philosopher, Writer
Jacinto Benavente Spanish Dramatist
Bahya ibn Paquda Jewish Philosopher
George Santayana Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
Pablo Picasso Spanish Painter
Graham Greene British Novelist
James Joyce Irish Novelist
Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist