John > John's Quotes

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The pen is the tongue of the mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“... he who's down one day can be up the next, unless he really wants to stay in bed, that is...”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Abundance, even of good things, prevents them from being valued”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“Honesty's the best policy.”
― Miguel de Cervantes

“Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical may be madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness ...Maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the sum of his own works.”
― Miguel De Cervantes

“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

“There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“All the vices, Sancho, bring some kind of pleasure with them; but envy brings nothing but irritation, bitterness, and rage.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“Many go out for wool, and come home shorn themselves.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing. Only we two are at one, despite that fictitious and Tordillescan scribe who has dared, and may dare again, to pen the deeds of my valorous knight with his coarse and ill-trimmed ostrich feather. This is no weight for his shoulders, no task for his frozen intellect; and should you chance to make his acquaintance, you may tell him to leave Don Quixote's weary and mouldering bones to rest in the grave, nor seek, against all the canons of death, to carry him off to Old Castile, or to bring him out of the tomb, where he most certainly lies, stretched at full length and powerless to make a third journey, or to embark on any new expedition. For the two on which he rode out are enough to make a mockery of all the countless forays undertaken by all the countless knights errant, such has been the delight and approval they have won from all to whose notice they have come, both here and abroad. Thus you will comply with your Christian profession by offering good counsel to one who wishes you ill, and I shall be proud and satisfied to have been the first author to enjoy the pleasure of witnessing the full effect of his own writing. For my sole object has been to arouse men's contempt for all fabulous and absurd stories of knight errantry, whose credit this tale of my genuine Don Quixote has already shaken, and which will, without a doubt, soon tumble to the ground. Farewell.”
― Cervantes, Don Quixote

“Tell me what company thou keepst, and I'll tell thee what thou art.”
― Miguel de Cervantes

“But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, it's bloom is shed;
Or, like the snow-fall in the river,
A moment white, then melts forever.”
― Robert Burns, Tam o' Shanter