Top 100 Quotes About Cervantes
#1. Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.
Jean Douchet
#2. At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments.
Teju Cole
#3. the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish.
Aubrey F.G. Bell
#4. Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.
Stephen Leacock
#5. In spite of these three obstacles, Menard's fragmentary _Quixote_ is more subtle than Cervantes'.
Jorge Luis Borges
#6. The world's male chivalry has perished out, but women are knights-errant to the last; and, if Cervantes had been greater still, he had made his Don a Donna.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#7. Cervantes said the journey's better than the end. Practices, to me, were the journey.
John Wooden
#8. Cervantes shrewdly advises to lay a bridge of silver for a flying enemy.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#9. Honesty's the best policy. - Miguel de Cervantes Liars prosper. - Anonymous
Stephen King
#10. In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.
Lytton Strachey
#11. Since then the romances of chivalry had been superseded by the flowering of literature that we know as the Spanish Golden Age, and by Cervantes's time nobody considered them to be a threat any more.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
#12. Since Cervantes's magnificent Knight's quest has cosmological scope and reverberation, no object seems beyond reach.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#13. If on a friend's bookshelf
You cannot find Joyce or Sterne
Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,
You are in danger, face the fact,
So kick him first or punch him hard
And from him hide behind a curtain.
Alexander Theroux
#14. All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#15. Comparisons are odious
Cervantes, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, ect...
Talon Rihai
#17. I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.
Lord Byron
#18. Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.
Steven Moore
#19. Cervantes, the soldier and adventurer, rose above the prejudices of his class, while Shakespeare never lifted his eyes beyond the narrow horizon of the Court to which he catered. It was love that opened Cervantes's eye, and it is in all-embracing love that Shakespeare was deficient.
William Shakespeare
#20. Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.
Harold Bloom
#21. Plato is never sullen, Cervantes is never petulant, Demosthenes never comes unseasonably, Dante never stays too long.
Nathaniel Parker
#22. Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.
Jorge Luis Borges
#23. Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that's been brewing since Cervantes.
Hal Duncan
#24. There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
Agnes Repplier
#25. Folly is
so human that it has common roots with poetry and tragedy; it is
revealed as much in the insane asylum as in the writings of a
Cervantes or a Shakespeare, or in the deep psychological insights
and cries of revolt of a Nietzsche.
Richard Howard
#26. I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#27. But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the novel as a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol, of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius.
Mikhail Bulgakov
#28. For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.
Ismail Kadare
#29. We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past 3,000 years have come from Europe. There is no other Greek theatre anywhere else in the world. There is no other Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes.
Ismail Kadare
#30. 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
Cecilia London
#31. The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
Milan Kundera
#32. Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his country.
Lord Byron
#33. the french ambassador to spain, meeting cervantes,congratulated him on the great success and reputation gained by his "don quixote"; whereupon the author whispered in his ear: "had it not been for the inquisition, i should have made my book much more entertaining.
Isaac D'Israeli
#34. Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.
James Thurber
#35. You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.
Carl Sagan
#36. Cervantes is the most important Spanish writer. But he is not the most representative of the Spanish. His irony, his sense of humor - they are too subtle to seem Spanish.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#37. ...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.
And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.
Ettore Scola
#38. He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.
Miguel De Cervantes
#39. Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth.
Miguel De Cervantes
#40. Liberty ... is one of the most valuable blessings that Heaven has bestowed upon mankind.
Miguel De Cervantes
#42. History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.
Miguel De Cervantes
#43. 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
#44. I come to a world of iron to make a world of gold.
Cervantes
#45. 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
#46. When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
Miguel De Cervantes
#47. History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth.
Miguel De Cervantes
#52. Tis an old saying, the Devil lurks behind the cross. All is not gold that glitters. From the tail of the plough, Bamba was made King of Spain; and from his silks and riches was Rodrigo cast to be devoured by the snakes.
Miguel De Cervantes
#54. The woman who is resolved to be respected can make herself be so even amidst an army of soldiers.
Miguel De Cervantes
#55. We ought to love our Maker for His own sake, without either hope of good or fear of pain.
Miguel De Cervantes
#59. 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
#60. She wanted, with her fickleness, to make my destruction constant; I want, by trying to destroy myself, to satisfy her desire.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#62. And thus being totally preoccupied, he rode so slowly that the sun was soon glowing with such intense heat that it would have melted his brains, if he'd had any.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#63. The village to sell (saving your presence) four pigs, and between dues and cribbings they got out of me little less than the worth of them. As
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#67. For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#68. I believe there's no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences.
Miguel De Cervantes
#69. But once more I say do as you please, for we women are born to this burden of being obedient to our husbands, though they be blockheads
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#73. Now, tell me which is the greater deed, raising a dead man or killing a giant?" "The answer is self-evident," responded Don Quixote. "It is greater to raise a dead man.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#74. I betook myself to these solitudes, resolved to end here the life I hated as if it were my mortal enemy. But fate would not rid me of it, contenting itself with robbing me of my reason,
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#76. Gaby wasn't having much luck with cats lately. The stray from yesterday had left her with red welts and a bad dream, and Lemon had just tried to eat her hair.
Angela Cervantes
#78. There is no jewel in the world so valuable as a chaste and virtuous woman.
Miguel De Cervantes
#81. Perceived a cart covered with royal flags coming along the road they were travelling; and persuaded that this must be some new adventure,
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#83. 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
#85. That's the nature of women, not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.
Miguel De Cervantes
#87. Does the devil possess you? You're leaping over the hedge before you come at the stile.
Miguel De Cervantes
#90. Ye love-smitten host, know that to Dulcinea only I am dough and sugar-paste, flint to all others; for her I am honey, for you aloes. For
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#95. Heaven send us better times! There is nothing but plotting and counter-plotting, undermining and counter-mining in this world.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#98. I never thrust my nose into other men's porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine; every man for himself, and God for us all.
Miguel De Cervantes
#99. All persons are not discreet enough to know how to take things by the right handle.
Miguel De Cervantes
