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

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

She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Life

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

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

Good painters imitate nature, bad ones spew it up.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Painters, Art, Painting

There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Doubt

Everyone is as God made him, and often a great deal worse.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Humanity, Humankind

He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he who loses his courage loses all.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Courage, Virtues, Friend, Bravery, Age

Beauty in a modest woman is like fire at a distance, or a sharp sword beyond reach.—The one does not burn, or the other wound those that come not too near them.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Beauty

It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Happiness

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: Dying, Death

Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things under ground, and much more in the skies.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Anxiety, Fear

Fair and softly goes far.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Kindness

By the streets of “by and by,” one arrives at the house of “never.”
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Future, The Future, Procrastination

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

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

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

There’s no taking trout with dry breeches.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Effort

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

Short sentences drawn from long experiences.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Proverbs

Let every man mind his own business.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Self-Discovery, Business

The eyes those silent tongues of love.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Face, Faces

Though God’s attributes are equal, yet his mercy is more attractive and pleasing in our eyes than his justice.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: God

A stout heart breaks bad luck.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Fortune, Luck

The stomach carries the heart, and not the heart the stomach.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Eating

‘Tis the only comfort of the miserable to have partners in their woes.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Misery, Money

Experience is the universal mother of sciences.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Experience

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

Thou hast seen nothing yet.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Potential, Possibilities

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Topics: Revenge, Parents, Parenting

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