Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“What a lot of foolish things you put on the same thread, Sancho! What does the subject of our conversation have to do with the proverbs you string together like beads? If you value your life, Sancho, be quiet, and from now on tend to spurring your donkey and leave matters alone that do not concern you.

The great achievement is to lose one’s reason for no reason,

hordes of enchanters always walk among us and alter and change everything and turn things into whatever they please, according to whether they wish to favor us or destroy us; and so, what seems to you a barber’s basin seems to me the helmet of Mambrino, and will seem another thing to someone else. It was rare foresight on the part of the wise man who favors me to make what is really and truly the helmet of Mambrino seem a basin to everyone else, because it is held in such high esteem that everyone would pursue me in order to take it from me; but since they see it as only a barber’s basin, they do not attempt to obtain it,

all the things I am doing are not jokes but very real; otherwise, I would be contravening the rules of chivalry that command us never to lie, or else suffer the punishment of those who relapse into sin, and doing one thing instead of another is the same as lying. And

have not seen her more than four times; and it well may be that with regard to these four times, she might not have noticed the one time I looked at her;

she’s something of a trollop: she jokes with everybody and laughs and makes fun of everything.

as if you were choosing pears,

can think she is the highest princess in the world. Because you should know, Sancho, if you do not know already, that two things inspire love more than any other; they are great beauty and a good name, and these two things reach their consummation in Dulcinea, for in beauty, no one is her equal, and as for a good name, few can approach her.

they were pleased by the details he recounted, for they were of the sort that should not be passed over in silence and deserved the same attention as the principal part of the story.

munificent;

my dear Señora, or Señor, or whatever it is you wish to be,

Woke

began to speak in such a manner that I do not know how it is possible for a lie to be so skillful and its words so cleverly arranged that they seem to be the truth.

Rahhhhhhh

irrational attraction, which is more likely,

Don Fernando was a man of limited understanding for having cast aside so much beauty.

Bars

first impulses are not in the hands of men.”

even if he hid in the belly of the whale.”

no one will be so ignorant as to mistake any of these books for true history.

I may be an innkeeper, but I’m still a Christian.”

Bars

women’s honor consists entirely of the good opinion others have of them;

showers of gold are there, too.5

hope is always born at the same time as love;

“because love, I’ve heard it said, sometimes flies and sometimes walks; it runs with one, and goes slowly with another; it cools some and burns others; some it wounds, and others it kills; it begins the rush of its desires at one point, and at the same point it ends and concludes them; in the morning it lays siege to a fortress, and by nightfall it has broken through, because there is no power that can resist it.