Digital Quixote

Everything you need to know about Don Quixote.

An aged manuscript page with a quill, source of the novel's famous lines
Every saying on this page is quoted verbatim from the Ormsby translation. AI-generated dramatization art — not a historical depiction.

Famous Sayings from Don Quixote

Twenty of the most famous lines from the novel — quoted verbatim, with part and chapter.

All quotations below are from the public-domain English translation by John Ormsby (1885), verified word-for-word against the text published as Project Gutenberg eBook #996. Each entry names the speaker and the scene. Where Cervantes wrote the line, it is his; where a character speaks it, the entry says so. Nothing here is paraphrase dressed up as quotation — for the verification method, see methodology.

1. The opening sentence

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.

Reference: Part I, chapter 1 — the narrator introduces Alonso Quixano. The deliberate refusal to name the village is the first of the novel's many games with its own authority.

2. The knight must have a lady

for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, or a body without a soul.

Reference: Part I, chapter 1 — the narrator explains why Quixano, having armed himself and named his horse, must invent a lady before he can ride out. It is the reason Dulcinea exists.

3. Rocinante's name

he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.

Reference: Part I, chapter 1 — Quixano names his horse. "Rocinante" plays on rocín (a broken-down horse), elevated into a knightly title.

4. Dulcinea's name

he decided upon calling her Dulcinea del Toboso — she being of El Toboso — a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon, and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself and the things belonging to him.

Reference: Part I, chapter 1 — Quixano renames Aldonza Lorenzo, a farm girl from the village of El Toboso. She never appears in the novel in person.

5. "I know who I am"

"I know who I am," replied Don Quixote, "and I know that I may be not only those I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and even all the Nine Worthies, since my achievements surpass all that they have done all together and each of them on his own account."

Reference: Part I, chapter 5 — beaten on the road and found by a neighbor, Quixote answers with absolute certainty. It is the novel's purest statement of his chosen identity.

6. "Fly not, cowards and vile beings"

shouting, "Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for a single knight attacks you."

Reference: Part I, chapter 8 — Quixote's battle cry as he charges the windmills. Among the most quoted lines in the book.

7. Against the giant Briareus

"Though ye flourish more arms than the giant Briareus, ye have to reckon with me."

Reference: Part I, chapter 8 — spoken to the windmills as their sails begin to turn. Briareus, the hundred-armed giant of classical myth, is the measure of the "giants" Quixote believes he faces.

8. Sancho's warning, unheeded

"did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head."

Reference: Part I, chapter 8 — Sancho Panza, after dragging his master from under the wreck of the lance. It is the first great exchange of the novel's central dialogue.

9. The Golden Age speech

"Happy the age, happy the time, to which the ancients gave the name of golden, not because in that fortunate age the gold so coveted in this our iron one was gained without toil, but because they that lived in it knew not the two words 'mine' and 'thine'!"

Reference: Part I, chapter 11 — Quixote's long speech to the goatherds on a lost age of shared plenty. One of the novel's most anthologized passages, and the clearest window into his idealism.

10. Diligence is the mother of good fortune

"It is a common proverb, fair lady, that 'diligence is the mother of good fortune,' and experience has often shown in important affairs that the earnestness of the negotiator brings the doubtful case to a successful termination."

Reference: Part I, chapter 46 — spoken by Don Quixote (identified in the narrative as "Don Quixote") to the lady in the inn during his enchanted-cage episode. It is one of Cervantes's most repeated proverbs, put in the mouth of the "mad" knight at his most sensible.

11. History is sacred — when it is true

"History is in a measure a sacred thing, for it should be true, and where the truth is, there God is."

Reference: Part II, chapter 3 — Don Quixote to the bachelor Samson Carrasco, in the novel's meditation on how his own story is being written.

12. There is no book so bad…

"There is no book so bad but it has something good in it," said the bachelor.

Reference: Part II, chapter 3 — spoken by Samson Carrasco. Cervantes attributes the saying to Pliny elsewhere; here it is the young graduate defending the published Part I against the knight's objections.

13. Sancho on human nature

for each of us is as God made him, aye, and often worse.

Reference: Part II, chapter 4 — Sancho Panza. One of Sancho's many proverbs that cut deeper than the company expects.

14. The pen is the tongue of the mind

the pen is the tongue of the mind, and as the thought engendered there, so will be the things that it writes down.

Reference: Part II, chapter 16 — Don Quixote, in conversation with the Knight of the Green Coat. A writer's maxim spoken by the character Cervantes is still inventing.

15. All comparisons are odious

for you know very well that all comparisons are odious.

Reference: Part II, chapter 23 — Don Quixote, in the Cave of Montesinos episode. An old proverb, given new life in its most famous literary setting.

16. The pitcher and the stone

whether the pitcher hits the stone, or the stone the pitcher, it's a bad business for the pitcher.

Reference: Part II, chapter 43 — Sancho Panza, receiving Don Quixote's advice before his governorship. Sancho's proverbs are the novel's other great treasury of quotable speech.

17. Sancho to heaven

I'd rather go Sancho to heaven than governor to hell.

Reference: Part II, chapter 43 — Sancho Panza. His earthy counterweight to every grand ambition, his own included.

18. Freedom, Sancho

"Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, life may and should be ventured; and on the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can fall to the lot of man."

Reference: Part II, chapter 58 — Don Quixote, on the road to Barcelona. Cervantes, who spent five years as a captive in Algiers, gives his knight the novel's most personal speech.

19. A piece of bread owed to no one

"Happy he, to whom heaven has given a piece of bread for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but heaven itself!"

Reference: Part II, chapter 58 — Don Quixote, in the same conversation as the freedom speech. Independence, for the knight, is worth more than any governorship.

20. The epitaph

A doughty gentleman lies here; A stranger all his life to fear; Nor in his death could Death prevail, In that last hour, to make him quail. He for the world but little cared; And at his feats the world was scared; A crazy man his life he passed, But in his senses died at last.

Reference: Part II, chapter 74 — the epitaph composed by Samson Carrasco, which closes the novel's account of the knight. After his deathbed renunciation of chivalry, it is the book's final word on its hero: crazy in life, sane at the last.

Source notes