Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote does regard himself as God’s knight, but he continuously follows his own capricious will, which is gloriously idiosyncratic.

Do we know exactly who we are? The more urgently we quest for our authentic selves, the more they tend to recede. The Knight and Sancho, as the great work closes, know exactly who they are, not so much by their adventures as through their marvelous conversations, be they quarrels or exchanges of insights.

In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.

The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame.

I was born free, and in order to live free I chose the solitude of the countryside. The trees of these mountains are my companions, the clear waters of these streams my mirrors; I communicate my thoughts and my beauty to the trees and to the waters. I am a distant fire and a far-off sword.

“Even so, I want you to know, brother Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “that there is no memory that time does not erase, no pain not ended by death.”

“That is the nature of women,” said Don Quixote. “They reject the man who loves them and love the man who despises them.

Besides, naked I was born, and naked I’ll die: I don’t lose or gain a thing;

“Therein lies the virtue,” responded Don Quixote, “and the excellence of my enterprise, for a knight errant deserves neither glory nor thanks if he goes mad for a reason. The great achievement is to lose one’s reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were cause? Moreover, I have more than enough reason because of my long absence from her who is forever my lady, Dulcinea of Toboso; as you heard the shepherd Ambrosio say, all ills are suffered and feared by one who is absent.

“For the love of God, Señor, don’t let me see your grace naked, for that will make me feel so bad I won’t be able to stop crying,

“Madman, what are you saying?” replied Don Quixote. “Have you lost your mind?”

This peace is the true purpose of war, and saying arms is the same as saying war. Accepting it is true that the purpose of war is peace,

each man is the child of his actions,

and though it is better to be praised by a few wise men and mocked by many fools, I do not wish to subject myself to the confused judgment of the presumptuous mob, who tend to be the ones who read these books.

The canon was astonished when he heard Don Quixote’s mixture of truth and falsehood and saw how well-informed he was regarding everything related to and touching on the exploits of knight errantry, and so he responded:

the administration of justice has to be tended to by the owner of the estate, and this is where ability and good judgment come in, and in particular a real intention to do what is right, for if this is lacking at the beginning, the middle and the end will always be wrong; in this way, God tends to favor the virtuous desires of the simple man and confound the wicked intentions of the intelligent.”

the closefisted rich man will be a miserly beggar, for the person who possesses wealth is not made happy by having it but by spending it, and not spending it haphazardly but in knowing how to spend it well.

There are two roads, my dears, which men can take to become rich and honored: one is that of letters, the other that of arms.

But let them say whatever they want; naked I was born, I’m naked now: I haven’t lost or gained a thing; as long as I’ve been put in books and passed from hand to hand out in the world, I don’t care what they say about me.”

though we as Christians, Catholics, and knights errant must care more for future glory, eternal in the ethereal and celestial spheres, than for the vanity of the fame achieved in this present and transitory world;

truth may be stretched thin and not break, and it always floats on the surface of the lie, like oil on water.

have you ever seen a play that presents kings, emperors, and pontiffs, knights, ladies, and many other characters? One plays the scoundrel, another the liar, this one the merchant, that one the soldier, another the wise fool, yet another the foolish lover, but when the play is over and they have taken off their costumes, all the actors are equal.” “Yes, I have seen that,” responded Sancho. “Well, the same thing happens in the drama and business of this world, where some play emperors, others pontiffs, in short, all the figures that can be presented in a play, but at the end, which is when life is over, death removes all the clothing that differentiated them, and all are equal in the grave.”

time is bound to take our lives, and we don’t have to go around looking for reasons to end our lives before their time and season, when they’re ripe and ready to fall.”

So tell me now, who’s crazier: the man who’s crazy because he can’t help it or the man who chooses to be crazy?”

There are only two lineages in the world, as my grandmother used to say, and that’s the haves and the have-nots, though she was on the side of having;

“The tambourine’s in just the right hands,”

When Sancho Panza heard his master say this, he thought he would lose his mind or die laughing; since he knew the truth about the feigned enchantment of Dulcinea, for he had been the enchanter and had invented the story, he recognized beyond the shadow of a doubt that his master was out of his mind and completely mad, and so he said:

“Now I say,” said Don Quixote at this point, “that the man who reads a good deal and travels a good deal, sees a good deal and knows a good deal.

future things cannot be known except through conjecture, and only occasionally, for knowing all times and moments is reserved to God alone, and for Him there is no past or future: everything is present.

Aren’t a thousand plays performed almost every day that are full of a thousand errors and pieces of nonsense, and yet are successful productions that are greeted not only with applause but with admiration? Go on, boy, and let them say what they will, for as long as I fill my purse, there can be more errors than atoms in the sun.”

Prudent men and well-ordered nations take up arms and unsheathe their swords and risk their persons, lives, and fortunes for only four reasons: first, in defense of the Catholic faith; second, in self-defense, which is a natural and divine law; third, in defense of their honor, their family, and their fortune; fourth, to serve their king in a just war; and if we wish to add a fifth, which can be considered the second, it is in defense of their country.

Now, when I intended to place you in a position where, despite your wife, you would be called Señor, now you take your leave? Now you go, when I had the firm and binding intention of making you lord of the best ínsula in the world? In short, as you have said on other occasions, there is no honey…5 You are a jackass, and must be a jackass, and will end your days as a jackass, for in my opinion, your life will run its course before you accept and realize that you are an animal.”

The duchess was weak with laughter when she heard Sancho speak, and in her opinion he was more amusing and even crazier than his master, an opinion held by many at the time.

Sancho Panza is one of the most amusing squires who ever served a knight errant; at times his simpleness is so clever that deciding if he is simple or clever is a cause of no small pleasure; his slyness condemns him for a rogue, and his thoughtlessness confirms him as a simpleton; he doubts everything, and he believes everything; when I think that he is about to plunge headlong into foolishness, he comes out with perceptions that raise him to the skies.

I believe my master, Don Quixote, is completely crazy, even though sometimes he says things that in my opinion, and in the opinion of everybody who hears him, are so intelligent and well-reasoned that Satan himself couldn’t say them better; but even so, truly and without any scruples, it’s clear to me that he’s a fool.

the little birds of the field have God to protect and provide for them,

“Señora, where there is music, there can be nothing bad.”

you must look at who you are and make an effort to know yourself, which is the most difficult knowledge one can imagine.

But, as has been said so often in the course of this great history, he spoke nonsense only with regard to chivalry, and in other conversations he demonstrated a clear and confident understanding,

Eat sparingly at midday and even less for supper, for the health of the entire body is forged in the workshop of the stomach. Be temperate in your drinking, remembering that too much wine cannot keep either a secret or a promise.

Be moderate in your sleeping, for the man who does not get up with the sun does not possess the day;

I’d rather go to heaven as Sancho than to hell as a governor.”

holiness consists of charity, humility, faith, obedience, and poverty; but even so, I say that a man must be very close to God if he can be content with being poor,

‘Possess all things as if you possessed them not,’ and this is called poverty in spirit;

Be a father to virtues and a stepfather to vices.

tell my lord the duke that I was born naked, and I’m naked now: I haven’t lost or gained a thing;

He had not gone very far from the ínsula of his governorship—he had never bothered to find out if it was an island, city, town, or village that he was governing—when

during the time and period when one eats and drinks, cares tend to be of little importance.

most were sad and melancholy at seeing that the long-awaited combatants had not hacked each other to pieces, just as boys are sad when the hanged man they have been waiting for does not come out because he has been pardoned,

Now it seemed to Don Quixote that it would be good for him to abandon the extreme idleness in which he had been living in the castle,