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Don Quixote Quotes

Browse 30 quotes about Don Quixote.

Don Quixote Quotes

“While it would be too reductive (but not wrong) to say Cervantes equates knight-errantry with religious belief, he does seem to insinuate a syllogism that goes: Chivalric novels are false; the Bible resembles those novels; therefore, the Bible is false. But Cervantes gleefully complicates matters by insisting repeatedly that Don Quixote is true, which he and everyone who reads it knows is untrue.”

BibleCervantesDon Quixote
Book:The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800
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“All I do know is that so long as I'm asleep I'm rid of all fears and hopes and toils and glory, and long live the man who invented sleep, the cloak that covers all human thoughts, the food that takes away hunger, the water that chases away thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that cools the heat and, in short, the universal coinage that can buy anything, the scales and weights that make the shepherd the equal of the king and the fool the equal of the wise man. There's only one drawback about sleep, so I've heard – it's like death, because there's very little difference between a man who's asleep and one who's dead.”

WisdomSleepDon QuixoteSancho Panza
Book:Don Quixote
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“I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son. What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap?”

ReasonAtheismMadnessAtheistAbsurdityLeap Of FaithDon QuixoteQuixoticUnamunoMiguel De UnamunoFideismBaylePierre Bayle
Author:Martin Gardner
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“As you know, I have wealth of my own and do not desire anyone else's; I am free and do not care to submit to another; I do not love or despise anyone. I do not deceive this one or solicit that one; I do not mock one or amuse myself with another. The honest conversation of the shepherdesses from these hamlets, and tending to my goats, are my entertainment. The limits of my desires are these mountains, and if they go beyond here, it is to contemplate the beauty of heaven and the steps whereby the soul travels to its first home.”

CervantesDon QuixoteDon QuijoteMarcela
Book:Don Quixote
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“And so, let it be said that this aforementioned gentleman spent his times of leisure --which meant most of the year-- reading books of chivalry with so much devotion and enthusiasm that he forgot almost completely about the hunt and even about the administration of his estate; and in his rash curiosity and folly he went so far as to sell acres of arable land in order to buy books of chivalry to read, and he brought as many of them as he could into his house...”

ReadingBooksCervantesDon Quixote
Book:Don Quijote
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“[He] looked exactly like Michael's idea of Don Quixote, 'the luminary and mirror of all knight-errantry', and for that gentle and melancholy knight Michael had always had the greatest affection. Indeed, he was almost his favourite character in literature . . . And he had been created by a man in prison . . . The thought of the great Cervantes, 'the maimed perfection', and of his sufferings so triumphantly endured, was one of the things that had helped to keep him sane many times, he imagined. He was young enough to believe that men go mad, that men die, more easily than in fact they do. He put the point where endurance is no longer possible at a reasonable distance along the way, not at that distant point where John could have told him that it does in fact exist.”

InspirationalCervantesDon QuixoteElizabeth Goudge
Book:The Rosemary Tree
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“A thought expressed is a falsehood." In poetry what is not said and yet gleams through the beauty of the symbol, works more powerfully on the heart than that which is expressed in words. Symbolism makes the very style, the very artistic substance of poetry inspired, transparent, illuminated throughout like the delicate walls of an alabaster amphora in which a flame is ignited. Characters can also serve as symbols. Sancho Panza and Faust, Don Quixote and Hamlet, Don Juan and Falstaff, according to the words of Goethe, are "schwankende Gestalten." Apparitions which haunt mankind, sometimes repeatedly from age to age, accompany mankind from generation to generation. It is impossible to communicate in any words whatsoever the idea of such symbolic characters, for words only define and restrict thought, but symbols express the unrestricted aspect of truth. Moreover we cannot be satisfied with a vulgar, photographic exactness of experimental photoqraphv. We demand and have premonition of, according to the allusions of Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, Ibsen, new and as yet undisclosed worlds of impressionability. This thirst for the unexperienced, in pursuit of elusive nuances, of the dark and unconscious in our sensibility, is the characteristic feature of the coming ideal poetry. Earlier Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe said that the beautiful must somewhat amaze, must seem unexpected and extraordinary. French critics more or less successfully named this feature - impressionism. Such are the three major elements of the new art: a mystical content, symbols, and the expansion of artistic impressionability. No positivistic conclusions, no utilitarian computation, but only a creative faith in something infinite and immortal can ignite the soul of man, create heroes, martyrs and prophets... People have need of faith, they need inspiration, they crave a holy madness in their heroes and martyrs. ("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")”

DecadenceDon JuanHamletImpressionismFaustBaudelaireGoetheIbsenDon QuixoteEdgar Allan PoeFalstaffDecadentsSymbolistMaupassantTurgenevFlaubertSancho Panza
Book:Silver Age of Russian Culture
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“As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting. However once he actually kills someone, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because only they give meaning to his tragic misdeed. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to those sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.”

FantasiesDon QuixoteFooling YourselfSunk Cost Fallacy
Book:Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
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“El grande Homero no escribió en latín, porque era griego, ni Virgilio no escribió en griego, porque era latino. En resolución, todos los poetas antiguos escribieron en la lengua que mamaron en la leche, y no fueron a buscar las extranjeras para declarar la alteza de sus conceptos; y siendo esto así, razón sería se extendiese esta costumbre por todas las naciones, y que no se desestimase el poeta alemán porque escribe en su lengua, ni el castellano, ni aun el vizcaíno, que escribe en la suya.”

Don QuixoteTranslating
Book:Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
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“I was enchanted by the stories she told me - especially those about Don Quixote de la Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza. Sometimes, I imagined going out into the world in search of adventure, just like them. I saw myself as Don Quixote riding his mighty Rocinante in those days. Now, I see myself more as Sancho...”

KnightDon QuixoteDon QuijoteSanchoSancho PanzaDon Quijote De La ManchaDon Quixote QuotesSaavedra
Book:The Wolf and the Shepherd
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“You like to read?" Reading was one of David's favorite things to do. So much more enjoyable than talking or exchanging pleasantries with strangers. "Yes, do you?" she asked, a hopeful look on her face. "Indeed, I do....I regretted that I could only fit one book in my rucksack on the Continent." .."Oh, do tell me, what was it?" "In English you would call it The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of Lamancha, but I had the Spanish version." "..Don Quixote. A comedy is it not?' ..."Marianne gave it to me. She said I would need something silly to cheer me on the battlefield. But I read it so many times, I must say my opinion of the book changed, more than once." "How so?", she asked... "At first I thought it was a comedy, then I came to regard it as a tragic novel, because Quixote was considered mad and treated like a lunatic. But in the end I found it life-changing." .."How so?" "The book save my life, in more ways than one. Reading it kept me sane all those long, sleepless nights in the cold...." "How else did it save your life?" Lady Annabelle asked... .."It quite literally saved me from death. When the French captured me and a small group of my men, they began executing the officers. Only when they got to me, they rifled through my rucksack and when they saw the book, they realized I could speak Spanish. That was of use to them so they kept me alive as an interpreter.”

Don QuixoteNapoleonic WarsPower Of Books
Book:Earl Lessons
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“I excused myself to the woman I was with and made my way over to these men. I stopped to ask my friend Buller to watch my back. The thing is, people like this can’t be talked to, and so I wasn’t going to mess around with this crazed windmill and his sidekick, Don Quixote. I hit the mouthy crazed windmill with a thumping right, a left, right, smack on the chin; he fell apart and was out for the count before he hit the deck. I turned to Don Quixote and off he shot like the Disney cartoon character of Speedy Gonzales.”

Violence In SocietyRichy HorsleyDon QuixoteStreet Fightter
Book:Born to Fight: The True Story of Richy Crazy Horse Horsley
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“FIGARO. Such a fantastic chain of events! How did it all happen to me? Why those things and not others? Who pointed them in my direction? Having no choice but to travel a road I was not aware I was following, and which I will get off without wanting to, I have strewn it with as many flowers as my good humour has permitted. But when I say my good humour, how can I know if it is any more mine than all the other bits of me, nor what this ‘me’ is that I keep trying to understand: first, an unformed bundle of indefinable parts, then a puny, weak-brained runt, a dainty frisking animal, a young man with a taste for pleasure and appetites to match, turning his hand to all trades to survive—sometimes master, sometimes servant as chance dictated, ambitious from pride, hard-working from necessity, but always happy to be idle! An orator when it was safe to speak out, a poet in my leisure hours, a musician as the situation required, in love in crazy fits and bursts. I’ve seen it all, done it all, had it all. Then the bubble burst and I was too disillusioned… Disillusioned!”

ConsciousnessIndividualismPersonaHamletDon QuixoteFigaro
Book:The Barber of Seville / The Marriage of Figaro / The Guilty Mother
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