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Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a representative of Neo-romanticism.

Quotes

 * To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
 * An Inland Voyage (1878), Ch. III, "The Royal Sport Nautique".

 * Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
 * An Inland Voyage (1878).

 * Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.
 * An Inland Voyage (1878).

 * Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
 * 'La Fère of Cursed Memory', 15th vignette of An Inland Voyage (1878), in Collected Memoirs, Travel Sketches and Island Literature of Robert Louis Stevenson, Stevenson, e-artnow (2015)

 * For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
 * Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1878).

 * In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
 * A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).

 * Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.
 * A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).

 * To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
 * Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882).

 * In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
 * Old Mortality (1884).

 * I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way.
 * Memories and Portraits, ch. IV. A College Magazine (1887).

 * Youth is wholly experimental.
 * Letter to a Young Gentleman Scribner's Magazine (September 1888).

 * Nothing like a little judicious levity.
 * The Wrong Box, ch. 7 (1889).

 * Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker.
 * The Wrong Box, ch. 8.

 * So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
 * "Lay Morals" Ch. 4, in Lay Morals and Other Essays (1911).

 * Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
 * Prayer, inscribed on the bronze memorial to Stevenson in St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Scotland

 * Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.
 * Complete Works, vol. 26, Reflections and Remarks on Human Life, section 4''.

 * The pleasant Land of Counterpane.
 * The Land of Counterpane, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

 * Youth now flees on feathered foot.
 * To Will H. Low, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

 * Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
 * Prince Otto, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

 * There is but one art, to omit.
 * As cited in The Harper Book of Quotations, Revised Edition (1993), Ed. R. Fitzhenry, HarperCollins, p. 498 : ISBN 0062732137, 9780062732132

 * It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about.
 * "Reflections and Remarks on Human Life", VI: Right and Wrong, published in Works: Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson -- Sketches, Criticisms, Etc. (1895), p. 628.

 * He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!
 * Letter to Sidney Colvin, 2 August 1881. Quoted in Terrorism and Literature Chapter 12 - “Parliament Is Burning” by Deaglán Ó Donghaile ISBN 9781316987292

 * A good conscience is eight parts of courage.
 * Catriona, ch. XI (1893).

Aes Triplex (1878)

 * The Oxford Book of Essays ed. by John Gross (New York: Oxford, 1998) [Title is Latin for "triple brass," used by Horace]

 * Already an old man, he [Samuel Johnson] ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea.
 * 314.

 * We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.
 * 314.

 * To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.
 * 314.

 * It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room.
 * 315.

 * By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.
 * 316.

 * All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?
 * 316.

Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

 * Full text online

 * It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this — that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
 * Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1.

 * You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.
 * Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1.
 * Cornhill Magazine, (August 1876)

 * Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself - erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent play-things; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life.
 * Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.

 * Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.
 * Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.

 * Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
 * Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.

 * Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.
 * Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 3.

 * The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?
 * Truth of Intercourse.

 * The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
 * Truth of Intercourse.

 * There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless this is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand, some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high races and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such sayings with their proverbs. According to the latter, every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man.
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life.
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error.
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives.
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only “one undisturbed song of pure concent” to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices.
 * Crabbed Age and Youth.

 * Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough.
 * An Apology for Idlers.

 * There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. ... They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.
 * An Apology for Idlers.

 * It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say.
 * An Apology for Idlers.

 * Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
 * An Apology for Idlers.

 * Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
 * An Apology for Idlers.

 * There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.
 * An Apology for Idlers.

 * There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
 * An Apology for Idlers.

 *  A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.
 * An Apology for Idlers.

 * A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
 * An Apology for Idlers.

 * To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
 * El Dorado.

The New Arabian Nights (1882)

 * "I am in the habit," replied the Prince, "of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered."
 * The Suicide Club, Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts.

 * The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.
 * The Suicide Club, Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts.

 * People trifle with love. Now, I deny that love is a strong passion. Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
 * The Suicide Club, Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts.

 * Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?
 * The Suicide Club, Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts.

 * A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying.
 * The Suicide Club, Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk.

 * Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
 * The Suicide Club, The Adventure of the Hansom Cabs.

 * A woman can earn her pardon for a good year of disobedience by a single adroit submission.
 * The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Bandbox.

 * There are circumstances in which even the least energetic of mankind learn to behave with vigour and decision; and the most cautious forget their prudence and embrace foolhardy resolutions.
 * The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Bandbox.

 * Decisive actions are often taken in a moment and without any conscious deliverance from the rational parts of man.
 * The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders.

 * I confess I have no great notion of the use of books, except to amuse a railway journey; although, I believe, there are some very exact treatises on astronomy, the use of the globes, agriculture, and the art of making paper flowers. Upon the less apparent provinces of life I fear you will find nothing truthful.
 * The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders.

 * I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.
 * The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the House with the Green Blinds.

 * A man, Mr. Scrymgeour, may fall into a thousand perplexities, but if his heart be upright and his intelligence unclouded, he will issue from them all without dishonour.
 * The Rajah's Diamond, Story of the House with the Green Blinds.

 * The world is a great place and stocked with wealth and beauty, and there is no limit to the rewards that may be offered. Such an one who would refuse a million of money may sell his honour for an empire or the love of a woman.
 * The Rajah's Diamond, The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a Detective.

 * An appeal to his alarm is never a good plan to rid oneself of a spirited young man.
 * The Pavilion on the Links, ch. III.

 * Time passes quickly with lovers.
 * The Pavilion on the Links, ch. V.

 * In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.
 * A Lodging for the Night.

 * To spendthrifts money is so living and actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath.
 * A Lodging for the Night.

 * When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things.
 * The Sire de Maletroit's Door.

 * When a man is in a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the world. His horse whinnies to him; the trumpets blow and the girls look out of window as he rides into town before his company; he receives many assurances of trust and regard--sometimes by express in a letter--sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten.
 * The Sire de Maletroit's Door.

The Silverado Squatters (1883)

 * Full text online

 * And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.
 * Pt. I, ch. II.

 * Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.
 * Pt. I, ch. II.

 * If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!
 * Pt. I, ch. III

 * The wine is bottled poetry.
 * Pt. I, ch. II

 * The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.
 * Pt. I, ch. IV

 * This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.
 * Pt. II, ch. III.

 * There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.
 * Pt. II, ch. III.

 * Sanity itself is a kind of convention.
 * The Hunter’s Family

 * The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.
 * The Sea Fogs

 * It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation.
 * Episodes in the Story of a Mine.

 * Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.
 * Episodes in the Story of a Mine.

 * Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.
 * Toils And Pleasures.

 * But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.
 * Toils And Pleasures.

Treasure Island (1883)

 * Fifteen men on the dead man's chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
 * Ch. 1, The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow.

 * Doctors is all swabs... and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what do the doctor know of lands like that? — and I lived on rum, I tell you.
 * Ch. 3, The Black Spot.

 * "What is the Black Spot, Captain?" "That's a summons, mate."
 * Ch. 3.

 * They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.
 * Ch. 4, The Sea Chest.

 * Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!
 * Ch. 10, The Voyage.

 * We must go on, because we can't turn back.
 * Ch. 12, Council of War.

 * Many's a long night I've dreamed of cheese — toasted mostly.
 * Ch. 15, The Man of the Island.

 * Them that die will be the lucky ones!
 * Ch. 20, Silver's Embassy.

A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)

 * In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day.
 * Bed in Summer, st. 1.

 * A child should always say what's true And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table; At least as far as he is able.
 * Whole Duty of Children.

 * Whenever the moon and stars are set, Whenever the wind is high, All night long in the dark and wet, A man goes riding by. Late in the night when the fires are out, Why does he gallop and gallop about?
 * Windy Nights, st. 1.

 * I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.
 * My Shadow, st. 1.

 * The friendly cow all red and white, I love with all my heart: She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart.
 * The Cow, st. 1.

 * The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
 * Happy Thought.

 * Children, you are very little, And your bones are very brittle.
 * Good and Bad Children, st. 1.

Kidnapped (1886)

 * They were a rough lot indeed, as sailors mostly are: being men rooted out of all the kindly parts of life, and condemned to toss together on the rough seas, with masters no less cruel.
 * Ch. 7, I Go to Sea in the Brig "Covenant" of Dysart.

 * Each side, in these sort of civil broils, takes the name of honesty for its own.
 * Ch. 9, The Man with the Belt of Gold.

 * Am I no a bonny fighter?
 * Ch. 10, The Siege of the Round-House.

 * I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.
 * Ch. 14, The Islet.

 * I've a grand memory for forgetting, David.
 * Ch. 18, I Talk with Alan in the Wood of Lettermore.

Underwoods (1887)

 * Of all my verse, like not a single line; But like my title, for it is not mine. That title from a better man I stole: Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!
 * Title page poem

 * Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among roots, the maiden-fair, Wine-scented and poetic soul Of the capacious salad bowl.
 * Bk. I, To a Gardener.

 * Dear Andrew, with the brindled hair Who glory to have thrown in air, High over arm, the trembling reed, By Ale and Kail, by Till and Tweed.
 * Bk. I, To Andrew Lang.

 * Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
 * Bk. I, Requiem (the final sentence was used on Stevenson's Gravestone).

 * Who comes tonight? We ope the doors in vain
 * Bk. I, To Henry James.

 * My body which my dungeon is, And yet my parks and palaces: — Which is so great that there I go All the day long to and fro.
 * Pt. I, My Body Which My Dungeon Is.

 * There's just ae thing I cannae bear, An' that's my conscience.
 * Bk. II, In Scots, My Conscience.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

 * 'I incline to Cain's heresy,' he used to say quaintly: 'I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.'
 * Story of the Door.

 * It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity.
 * Story of the Door.

 * I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name.
 * Story of the Door.

 * It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.
 * Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon.

 * Man is not truly one, but truly two.
 * Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case.

 * The doom and burthen of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.
 * Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case.

 * All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.
 * Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case.

The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
Full text online

 * Those that have the underhand in any fighting, I have observed, are ever anxious to persuade themselves they were betrayed.
 * Ch. 1, Summary of Events during this Master’s Wanderings.

 * Let anyone speak long enough, he will get believers.
 * Ch. 1, Summary of Events during this Master’s Wanderings.

 * I have observed there are no persons so far away as those who are both married and estranged, so that they seem out of ear-shot or to have no common tongue.
 * Ch. 4, Persecutions Endured by Mr. Henry.

 * Thus in the best fabric of duplicity, there is some weak point, if you can strike it, which will loosen all.
 * Ch. 4, Persecutions Endured by Mr. Henry.

 * It is one of the worst things of sentiment, that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that which is spoken.
 * Ch. 4, Persecutions Endured by Mr. Henry.

 * Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is – nor yet so good a Christian.
 * Ch. 9, Mackellar’s Journey with the Master.

 * Hatred betrayed is hatred impotent.
 * Ch. 9, Mackellar’s Journey with the Master.

 * When we take our advantage unrelentingly, then we make war.
 * Ch. 9, Mackellar’s Journey with the Master.

 * There are double words for everything: the word that swells, the word that belittles.
 * Ch. 9, Mackellar’s Journey with the Master.

Across the Plains (1892)

 * The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action.
 * Ch. VII, The Lantern-Bearers.

 * We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.
 * Ch. IX, Beggars.

 * To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.
 * Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.

 * Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.
 * Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.

 * If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
 * Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.

 * Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed.
 * Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.

 * To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.
 * Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.

Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)

 * Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I ask, the heaven above And the road below me.
 * No. I, The Vagabond, st. 4.

 * The untented Kosmos my abode, I pass, a wilful stranger: My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger.
 * No. II, Youth and Love - I, st. 3.

 * I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.
 * No. XI, Romance, st. 1.

 * Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them.
 * No. XIV

 * In the highlands, in the country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces, And the young fair maidens Quiet eyes.
 * No. XV

 * God, if this were enough, That I see things bare to the buff.
 * No. XXV, If This Were Faith.

 * Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer Made my mate.
 * No. XXVI, My Wife.

 * Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home!
 * No. XLV, S.R. Crockett.

Weir of Hermiston (1896)

 * And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He will instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion. For even in this simple and antique relation of the mother and the child, hypocrisies are multiplied.
 * Ch. 1, Life and Death of Mrs. Weir.

 * Ice and iron cannot be welded.
 * Ch. 1, Life and Death of Mrs. Weir.

 * To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards without excitement.
 * Ch. 2, Father and Son.

 * The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions of men, all different from each other and from us; there's no royal road there, we just have to sclamber and tumble.
 * Ch. 4, Opinions of the Bench.

 * The commonplaces are the great poetic truths.
 * Ch. 6, A Leaf from Christina's Psalm-book.

Quotes about Stevenson

 * Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.
 * Jorge Luis Borges in "A History of Eternity" as translated in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger

 * The writer of modern times who seems to us most like the "simple great ones gone," Robert Louis Stevenson, owes much of his excellence to his modesty in being subject to restraint and his good sense in burdening himself with no partial doctrines to expound.
 * John Buchan, "Nonconformity in Literature", Glasgow Herald, 2nd November 1895. Quoted in James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939. Cham : Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2019 (p.177).

 * Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.''
 * "Tusitala" was a name used by Stevenson after he settled in Samoa; it is here referenced by G. K. Chesterton in his introductory poem to The Man Who Was Thursday.

 * "True success is to labor," you said./Though you died at forty-four,/who does more than what you did?/Making pages that would live so long... islands/as treasures.../human lives as treasures../you took a deep breath,/opened your packet of cheese and fruit, curled into/the words.
 * Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air (2018)

 * Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two Times leaders; among novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach.
 * Rebecca West, "Transition", in Henry James. London, 1916.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Robert Louis Stevenson


text:
George Santayana

Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana (16 December 1863 in Madrid, Spain – 26 September 1952 in Rome, Italy) was a Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist.

The Sense of Beauty (1896)

 * Project Gutenberg; Archive.org; Hathi Trust

 * On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.
 * Pt. III, Form; § 30: "The average modified in the direction of pleasure.", p. 125

 * Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.
 * Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 267

 * Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
 * Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 270

Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

 * [Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

 * Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

 * Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

 * That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

 * Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

 * Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
 * This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants:
 * Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
 * Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
 * Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
 * Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
 * Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
 * There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke (in Revolution in France) that often leads to misattribution: "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."

Vol. II, Reason in Society

 * The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

 * The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

 * To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
 * Ch. III: Industry, Government, the peasants

 * It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
 * Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal

 * Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
 * Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal

 * Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.
 * Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal

 * What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.
 * Ch. V: Democracy

 * When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
 * Ch. VI: Free Society

 * In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.
 * Ch. VIII: Ideal Society

 * Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
 * Ch. VIII: Ideal Society

Vol. III, Reason in Religion

 * Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.
 * Ch. I

 * Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
 * Ch. VI

 * Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
 * Ch. VII

 * Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.
 * Ch. XIV

Vol. IV, Reason in Art

 * To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.
 * Ch. IV.: Music

 * The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests.
 * Ch. IV.: Music

 * Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.
 * Ch. IX.: Justification of Art

Vol. V, Reason in Science

 * History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
 * Ch. 2 "History"

 * When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

 * Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.
 * Ch. 3 "Mechanism"

Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)

 * Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

 * Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

 * Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

 * The Bible is literature, not dogma.

The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911)

 * To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.
 * p. 48

 * Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
 * pp. 48-49

 * No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. ** p. 49

 * Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.
 * p. 50

 * To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.
 * p. 51

 * In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour.
 * p. 53

 * Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
 * p. 58

 * The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.
 * p. 60

 * Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.
 * p. 64

Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913)

 * Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism.
 * p. 35

 * Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world—and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?—are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.
 * pp. 39-40

 * No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.
 * p. 199

 * Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.
 * p. 199

Little Essays (1921)

 * The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
 * p. 107

Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

 * Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies at Archive.org

 * England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.
 * "The British Character"

 * Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.
 * "The British Character"

 * The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
 * "Dickens"

 * There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
 * "War Shrines"

 * To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.
 * "The Irony of Liberalism"

 * Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.
 * "The Irony of Liberalism"

 * Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.
 * "The Irony of Liberalism"

 * It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;
 * "The Irony of Liberalism"

 * Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.
 * "The Irony of Liberalism"

 * I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
 * "The Irony of Liberalism"

 * Only the dead have seen the end of war.
 * "Tipperary"

 * My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
 * "On My Friendly Critics"

 * The living have never shown me how to live.
 * "On My Friendly Critics"

 * Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
 * "On My Friendly Critics"

 * Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
 * "Friendships"

Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

 * Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
 * The Works of George Santayana p. 65

 * [The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
 * "Objections to Belief in Substance", p. 201

Dialogues in Limbo (1926)

 * Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.
 * P. 30

 * The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
 * "Normal Madness," Ch. 3, P. 56

 * The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
 * Ch. 3, P. 57

 * All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
 * Ch. 3, P. 62

 * Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
 * Ch. 4

Character and Opinion in the United States (1920)

 * American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
 * "The Academic Environment" p. 47 (Hathi Trust)

 * All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.
 * "Materialism and Idealism" p. 175 (Hathi Trust)

Persons and Places (1944)

 * At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida. This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a little bacon, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally also small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served first.
 * p. 14

 * ... I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw.
 * p. 50

 * Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
 * p. 61

 * In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.

 * I was still “at the church door”. Yet in belief, in the clarification of my philosophy, I had taken an important step. I no longer wavered between alternative views of the world, to be put on or taken off like alternative plays at the theatre. I now saw that there was only one possible play, the actual history of nature and of mankind, although there might well be ghosts among the characters and soliloquies among the speeches. Religions, all religions, and idealistic philosophies, all idealistic philosophies, were the soliloquies and the ghosts. They might be eloquent and profound. Like Hamlet's soliloquy they might be excellent reflective criticisms of the play as a whole. Nevertheless they were only parts of it, and their value as criticisms lay entirely in their fidelity to the facts, and to the sentiments which those facts aroused in the critic.
 * p. 169

Other works

 * O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
 * O World, Thou Choosest Not (1894)

 * In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.
 * Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 54

 * Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void.
 * Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 251

 * There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
 * The Genteel Tradition at Bay (1931)

 * They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.
 * Obiter Scripta (1936)

 * Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
 * George Santayana, as quoted in Quotations for Our Time (1977) edited by Laurence J. Peter

 * I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.
 * The Poet's Testament

 * The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
 * The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946)

 * A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
 * “Why I Am Not a Marxist” “Modern Monthly: Volume: 9″ (April 1935); Page: 77-79.

Disputed

 * Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.
 * This statement is presented in quotes in The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta (2008) by Arvind Sharma, p. 216, as a "Santayanan point", but earlier publications by the same author, such as in A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion (2006), p. 161, state it to be a stance of Santayana without actually indicating or in any ways implying that it is a direct quotation.

 * The earth has music for those who listen.
 * This statement is commonly associated with Santayana, but no source or attribution can be found in his works or correspondence. *UPDATE: This quote is appropriately attributed to Reginald Vincent Holmes (1955, Fireside Fancies, Edwards Brothers Inc.)

Misattributed

 * The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
 * Giorgio de Santillana (1902-1974) The Crime of Galileo (1958)
 * Many sources mistakenly attribute this quote to Santayana, and one even identifies the correct book, without realizing that George Santayana and Giorgio de Santillana are two different people

= Quotes about Santayana =
 * The famous George Santayana quote: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” That's the thing, though. None of us have forgotten. Darned if we're not repeating it anyway...
 * Confederate flags and a noose: What century is this, anyway?, By Mark Bradley, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution  (22 June 2020)

 * Books are “imaginative rehearsals for living,” stated novelist George Santayana. They are also a great equalizer in a diverse society. Book reading helps prepare a child for mental liberation from ignorance, fear, and falsehood.
 * The lockdown’s lesson in reading books aloud, Christian Science Monitor (22 June 2020)

 * The writer-philosopher George Santayana is credited with the phrase: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet here we are, repeating that of just 52 years ago. Let us pray that come 2072, Americans then have at last heeded Santayana's warning and Dr. King’s dream is no longer words in a speech but reality being lived.
 * Geoff Caldwell: How long will history have to repeat before we learn?, The Joplin Globe (Jun 21, 2020)

 * I revelled in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young George Santayana.
 * The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (1968)

 * But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy!
 * William James, of Santayana's The Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), in a letter to George H. Palmer (1900), as quoted in George Santayana : A Biography (2003) by John McCormick

 * "In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not."
 * Gore Vidal, in Palimpsest, A Memoir (1995)

 * "There is no God, and Mary is his mother." Often, almost certainly incorrectly, attributed to Santayana himself. More plausibly attributed to Robert Lowell, as a sardonic description of Santayana's philosophy.
 * Paul Mariani, "Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell" (1994), p. 159

 * Santayana, indeed, is the Moses of the new naturalism, who discerned the promised land from afar but still wanders himself in the desert realms of being.
 * John Herman Randall, "The Nature of Naturalism", epilogue to Naturalism and the Human Spirit (1944)

title: George Santayana


text:
User:Basil Fawlty

See: w:User:Basil Fawlty

title: User:Basil Fawlty


text:
Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (29 September 1547 – 23 April 1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet and playwright. He is most famous for his novel Don Quixote, or Don Quijote de la Mancha, which is considered by many to be the first modern novel, one of the greatest works in Western literature, and the greatest of the Spanish language.

El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha) (1605–1615)

 * This famous work has been translated into English by many authors, and an attempt will be made to source the translations which are used here.

Prologue

 * Acontece tener un padre un hijo feo y sin gracia alguna, y el amor que le tiene le pone una venda en los ojos para que no vea sus faltas, antes las juzga por discreciones y lindezas y las cuenta a sus amigos por agudezas y donaires.
 * A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty.

 * ...estás en tu casa, donde eres señor della, como el rey de sus alcabalas.
 * You are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch in his throne.

 * I was so free with him as not to mince the matter.

 * They can expect nothing but their labour for their pains.

Book I

 * En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no hace mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.
 * In some village in La Mancha, whose name I do not care to recall, there dwelt not so long ago a gentleman of the type wont to keep an unused lance, an old shield, a skinny old horse, and a greyhound for racing.
 * Ch. 1.

 * Y así, del poco dormir y del mucho leer, se le secó el cerebro, de manera que vino a perder el juicio.
 * Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.
 * Ch. 1 (tr. Samuel Putnam).

 * As ill-luck would have it.
 * Ch. 2.

 * Which I have earned with the sweat of my brows.
 * Ch. 4.

 * By a small sample we may judge of the whole piece.
 * Ch. 4.

 * The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of his own works.
 * Ch. 4.

 * Put you in this pickle.
 * Ch. 5.

 * He had a face like a benediction.
 * Ch. 6.

 * Can we ever have too much of a good thing?
 * Ch. 6.

 * Take care, Your Worship, those things over there are not giants but windmills.
 * Ch. 8 (tr. J. M. Cohen, 1950).

 * The charging of his enemy was but the work of a moment.
 * Ch. 8.

Book II

 * Those two fatal words, Mine and Thine.
 * Ch. 3.

 * The eyes those silent tongues of Love.
 * Ch. 3.

 * There's not the least thing can be said or done, but people will talk and find fault.
 * Ch. 4.

 * Without a wink of sleep.
 * Ch. 4.

 * The soldier who executes his captain's commands is no less valuable than the captain who gave the order.
 * Ch. 5 (tr. Tobias Smollett, 1755).

Book III

 * It is a true saying that a man must eat a peck of salt with his friend before he knows him.
 * Ch. 1.

 * Fortune leaves always some door open to come at a remedy.
 * Ch. 1.

 * Fair and softly goes far.
 * Ch. 2.

 * No limits but the sky.
 * Ch. 3.

 * To give the devil his due.
 * Ch. 3.

 * Didn't I tell you, Don Quixote, sir, to turn back, for they were not armies you were going to attack, but flocks of sheep?
 * Ch. 3 (tr. J. M. Cohen, 1950).

 * Plain as the nose on a man's face.
 * Ch. 4.

 * Let me leap out of the frying-pan into the fire; or, out of God's blessing into the warm sun.
 * Ch. 4.

 * You are taking the wrong sow by the ear.
 * Ch. 4.

 * Bell, book, and candle.
 * Ch. 4.

 * You're leaping over the hedge before you come to the stile.
 * Ch. 4.

 * Let the worst come to the worst.
 * Ch. 5.

 * You are come off now with a whole skin.
 * Ch. 5.

 * Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies.
 * Ch. 6.

 * That's the nature of women ... not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.
 * Ch. 6.

 * Ill luck, you know, seldom comes alone.
 * Ch. 6.

 * Why do you lead me a wild-goose chase?
 * Ch. 6.

 * I find my familiarity with thee has bred contempt.
 * Ch. 6.

 * The more thou stir it, the worse it will be.
 * Ch. 6.

 * Now had Aurora displayed her mantle over the blushing skies, and dark night withdrawn her sable veil.
 * Ch. 6.

 * I tell thee, that is Mambrino's helmet.
 * Ch. 7.

 * Give me but that, and let the world rub; there I'll stick.
 * Ch. 7.

 * Sure as a gun.
 * Ch. 7.

 * Experience, the universal Mother of Sciences.
 * Ch. 7.

 * Sing away sorrow, cast away care.
 * Ch. 8.

 * Thank you for nothing.
 * Ch. 8.

 * After meat comes mustard; or, like money to a starving man at sea, when there are no victuals to be bought with it.
 * Ch. 8.

 * Of good natural parts and of a liberal education.
 * Ch. 8.

 * Would puzzle a convocation of casuists to resolve their degrees of consanguinity.
 * Ch. 8.

 * Let every man mind his own business.
 * Ch. 8.

 * Murder will out.
 * Ch. 8.

 * Thou art a cat, and a rat, and a coward.
 * Ch. 8.

 * Those who'll play with cats must expect to be scratched.
 * Ch. 8.

 * Raise a hue and cry.
 * Ch. 8.

 * To do good to villains is to pour water into the sea.
 * Ch. 9.

 * To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action when there is more reason to fear than to hope. 'Tis the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket. And though I am but a clown, or a bumpkin, as you may say, yet I would have you to know I know what is what, and have always taken care of the main chance...
 * Sancho to Don Quixote, in Ch. 9, (tr. Peter Anthony Motteux, 1701).

 * I know what's what, and have always taken care of the main chance.
 * Ch. 9.

 * The ease of my burdens, the staff of my life.
 * Ch. 9.

 * I am almost frighted out of my seven senses.
 * Ch. 9.

 * Within a stone's throw of it.
 * Ch. 9.

 * The very remembrance of my former misfortune proves a new one to me.
 * Ch. 10.

 * Absence, that common cure of love.
 * Ch. 10.

 * From pro's and con's they fell to a warmer way of disputing.
 * Ch. 10.

 * Let us make hay while the sun shines.
 * Ch. 11.

 * I never thrust my nose into other men's porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine; every man for himself, and God for us all.
 * Ch. 11.

 * Little said is soonest mended.
 * Ch. 11.

 * A close mouth catches no flies.
 * Ch. 11.

 * A knight errant who turns mad for a reason deserves neither merit nor thanks. The thing is to do it without cause.
 * Ch. 11 (tr. J. M. Cohen, 1950).

 * My lady can guess what I would do in the wet if I do all this in the dry.
 * Ch. 11 (tr. J. M. Cohen, 1950).

 * You are a devil at everything, and there is no kind of thing in the 'versal world but what you can turn your hand to.
 * Ch. 11.

 * It will grieve me so to the heart, that I shall cry my eyes out.
 * Ch. 11.

 * Thou hast seen nothing yet.
 * Ch. 11.

 * Let each man say what he chooses; if because of this I am criticized by the ignorant, I shall not be chastised by the learned.
 * Ch. 11 (tr. Edith Grossman, 2003).

 * My memory is so bad that many times I forget my own name.
 * Ch. 11.

 * Ready to split his sides with laughing.
 * Ch. 13.

Book IV

 * My honor is dearer to me than my life.
 * Ch. 1.

 * Delay always breeds danger.
 * Ch. 2.

 * In me the need to talk is a primary impulse, and I can't help saying right off what comes to my tongue.
 * Ch. 2 (tr. J. M. Cohen, 1950).

 * Think before thou speakest.
 * Ch. 3.

 * Let us forget and forgive injuries.
 * Ch. 3.

 * I must speak the truth, and nothing but the truth.
 * Ch. 3.

 * They must needs go whom the Devil drives.
 * Ch. 4.

 * A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
 * Ch. 4.

 * More knave than fool.
 * Ch. 4.

 * I can tell where my own shoe pinches me; and you must not think, sir, to catch old birds with chaff.
 * Ch. 5.

 * I never saw a more dreadful battle in my born days.
 * Ch. 8.

 * Here is the devil-and-all to pay.
 * Ch. 10.

 * I begin to smell a rat.
 * Ch. 10.

 * I will take my corporal oath on it.
 * Ch. 10.

 * The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
 * Ch. 10.

 * Let none presume to tell me that the pen is preferable to the sword.
 * Ch. 10.

 * It is past all controversy that what costs dearest is, and ought to be, most valued.
 * Ch. 11.

 * It is a common proverb, beauteous princess, that diligence is the mother of good fortune.
 * Ch. 19.

 * The bow cannot always stand bent, nor can human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation.
 * Ch. 21.

 * I would have nobody to control me; I would be absolute: and who but I? Now, he that is absolute can do what he likes; he that can do what he likes can take his pleasure; he that can take his pleasure can be content; and he that can be content has no more to desire. So the matter 's over; and come what will come, I am satisfied.
 * Ch. 23.

 * "You are a villain and a scoundrel," said Don Quixote, "and you are the one who is vacant and foolish; I have more upstairs than the whore who bore you ever did".
 * Ch. 25 (tr. Edith Grossman, 2003).

Part II (1615)

 * It is not the hand but the understanding of a man that may be said to write.
 * Author's Preface to Part II

Book I

 * When the head aches, all the members partake of the pains.
 * Ch. 2.

 * History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth.
 * Ch. 3.

 * There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.
 * Ch. 3.

 * "There is no book so bad," said the bachelor, "but something good may be found in it."
 * Ch. 3.

 * Cada uno es como Dios le hizo, y aún peor muchas veces.
 * Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.
 * Ch. 4.

 * Spare your breath to cool your porridge.
 * Ch. 5.

 * The best sauce in the world is hunger.
 * Ch. 5.

 * Journey over all the universe in a map, without the expense and fatigue of traveling, without suffering the inconveniences of heat, cold, hunger, and thirst.
 * Ch. 6.

 * The fair sex.
 * Ch. 6.

 * de todos ha de haber en el mundo
 * It takes all sorts to make a world. (Literally, “There must be of all [types] in the world”)
 * Ch. 6.

 * A little in one's own pocket is better than much in another man's purse. 'Tis good to keep a nest egg. Every little makes a mickle.
 * Ch. 7.

 * Remember the old saying, "Faint heart ne'er won fair lady."
 * Ch. 10.

 * Forewarned forearmed.
 * Ch. 10.

 * A stout man's heart breaks bad luck.
 * Ch. 10.

 * As well look for a needle in a bottle of hay.
 * Ch. 10.

 * There is a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us out flat some time or other.
 * Ch. 10.

 * Are we to mark this day with a white or a black stone?
 * Ch. 10.

 * I'll turn over a new leaf.
 * Ch. 13.

 * Let every man look before he leaps.
 * Ch. 14.

 * La pluma es la lengua del alma: cuales fueren los conceptos que en ella se engendraren, tales serán sus escritos.
 * The pen is the tongue of the soul; as are the thoughts engendered there, so will be the things written.
 * Ch. 16 (tr. Henry Edward Watts, 1895).

Book II

 * Marriage is a noose.
 * Ch. 19.

 * There are only two families in the world, the Haves and the Have-Nots.
 * Ch. 20.

 * Love and War are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.
 * Ch. 21.

 * A private sin is not so prejudicial in this world as a public indecency.
 * Ch. 22.

 * There is no love lost, sir.
 * Ch. 22.

 * He has an oar in every man's boat, and a finger in every pie.
 * Ch. 22.

 * Tell me thy company, and I'll tell thee what thou art.
 * Ch. 23.

 * Comparisons are odious.
 * Ch. 23.

 * I say patience, and shuffle the cards.
 * Ch. 23.

 * The proof of the pudding is the eating.
 * Ch. 24.

 * El que lee mucho y anda mucho vee mucho y sabe mucho.
 * He who reads much and walks much sees much and knows much.
 * Ch. 25.

 * Tomorrow will be a new day.
 * Ch. 26.

 * He is as like one, as one egg is like another.
 * Ch. 27.

 * You can see farther into a millstone than he.
 * Ch. 28.

 * Sancho Panza by name, is my own self, if I was not changed in my cradle.
 * Ch. 30.

 * "Sit there, clod-pate!" cried he; "for let me sit wherever I will, that will still be the upper end, and the place of worship to thee."
 * Ch. 31.

 * Building castles in the air, 36 and making yourself a laughing-stock.
 * Ch. 31.

 * It is good to live and learn.
 * Ch. 32.

 * Great persons are able to do great kindnesses.
 * Ch. 32.

Book III

 * Since Don Quixote de la Mancha is a crazy fool and a madman, and since Sancho Panza, his squire, knows it, yet, for all that, serves and follows him, and hangs on these empty promises of his, there can be no doubt that he is more of a madman and a fool than his master.
 * Ch. 33 (tr. J. M. Cohen, 1950).

 * He is as mad as a March hare.
 * Ch. 33.

 * I must follow him through thick and thin.
 * Ch. 33.

 * There is no love lost between us.
 * Ch. 33.

 * In the night all cats are gray.
 * Ch. 33.

 * All is not gold that glisters.
 * Ch. 33.

 * I can look sharp as well as another, and let me alone to keep the cobwebs out of my eyes.
 * Ch. 33.

 * I was ever charitable and good to the poor, and scorn to take the bread out of another man's mouth. On the other side, by our Lady, they shall play me no foul play. I am an old cur at a crust, and can sleep dog-sleep when I list. I can look sharp as well as another, and let me alone to keep the cobwebs out of my eyes. I know where the shoe wrings me. I will know who and who is together. Honesty is the best policy, I will stick to that. The good shall have my hand and heart, but the bad neither foot nor fellowship. And in my mind, the main point of governing, is to make a good beginning.
 * Ch. 33 (tr. Pierre Antoine Motteux, 1701)
 * Variant translations:
 * I'm kind-hearted by nature, and full of compassion for the poor; there's no stealing the loaf from him who kneads and bakes; and by my faith it won't do to throw false dice with me; I am an old dog, and I know all about 'tus, tus;' I can be wide-awake if need be, and I don't let clouds come before my eyes, for I know where the shoe pinches me; I say so, because with me the good will have support and protection, and the bad neither footing nor access. And it seems to me that, in governments, to make a beginning is everything; and maybe, after having been governor a fortnight, I'll take kindly to the work and know more about it than the field labour I have been brought up to.
 * Honesty's the best policy.

 * Nadie nace enseñado, y de los hombres se hacen los obispos, que no de las piedras.
 * Time ripens all things. No man is born wise. Bishops are made of men and not of stones.
 * Ch. 33. Note: "Time ripens all things" is the translator's interpolation and does not appear in the original Spanish text.

 * A good name is better than riches.
 * Ch. 33.

 * I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
 * Ch. 33.

 * An honest man's word is as good as his bond.
 * Ch. 33.

 * Heaven's help is better than early rising.
 * Ch. 34.

 * An honest man's word is as good as his bond.
 * Ch. 34.

 * I have other fish to fry.
 * Ch. 35.

 * There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things.
 * Ch. 35.

 * But all in good time.
 * Ch. 36.

 * Matters will go swimmingly.
 * Ch. 36.

 * Many go out for wool, and come home shorn themselves.
 * Ch. 37.

 * Good wits jump; a word to the wise is enough.
 * Ch. 37.

 * Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness — its opposite  — never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.
 * Ch. 38.

 * What a man has, so much he's sure of.
 * Ch. 38.

 * The pot calls the kettle black.
 * Ch. 38.

 * They had best not stir the rice, though it sticks to the pot.
 * Ch. 38.

 * Good wits jump; 45 a word to the wise is enough.
 * Ch. 38.

 * You may as well expect pears from an elm.
 * Ch. 40.

 * Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world.
 * Ch. 42.

 * You cannot eat your cake and have your cake; 48 and store 's no sore.
 * Ch. 43.

 * Diligence is the mother of good fortune.
 * Ch. 43.

 * What a man has, so much he is sure of.
 * Ch. 43.

 * When a man says, "Get out of my house! what would you have with my wife?" there is no answer to be made.
 * Ch. 43.

 * The pot calls the kettle black.
 * Ch. 43.

 * Mum's the word.
 * Ch. 44.

Book IV

 * This peck of troubles.
 * Ch. 53.

 * When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome.
 * Ch. 54.

 * If a governor comes out of his government rich, they say he has been a thief; and if he comes out poor, that he has been a noodle and a blockhead.
 * Ch. 55.

 * Many count their chickens before they are hatched; and where they expect bacon, meet with broken bones.
 * Ch. 55.

 * My thoughts ran a wool-gathering; and I did like the countryman who looked for his ass while he was mounted on his back.
 * Ch. 57.

 * Liberty ... is one of the most valuable blessings that Heaven has bestowed upon mankind.
 * Ch. 58.

 * As they use to say, spick and span new.
 * Ch. 58.

 * I think it a very happy accident.
 * Ch. 58.

 * There is no greater folly in this world than for a man to despair.
 * Ch. 59 (tr. Peter Anthony Motteux, 1701).

 * I shall be as secret as the grave.
 * Ch. 62.

 * Well, now, there's a remedy for everything except death.
 * Ch. 64

 * Now, blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.
 * Ch. 68.

 * Rome was not built in a day.
 * Ch. 71.

 * The ass will carry his load, but not a double load; ride not a free horse to death.
 * Ch. 71.

 * He has done like Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, who, being asked what he painted, answered, "Whatever it may turn out." And if he chanced to paint a cock, he wrote under it, "This is a cock," lest the people should take it for a fox.
 * Ch. 71.

 * He ... got the better of himself, and that's the best kind of victory one can wish for.
 * Ch. 72.

 * Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
 * Ch. 73.

 * Never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last.
 * Ch. 74.

 * There is a strange charm in the thoughts of a good legacy, or the hopes of an estate, which wondrously alleviates the sorrow that men would otherwise feel for the death of friends.
 * Ch. 74.

 * For if he like a madman lived, At least he like a wise one died.
 * Ch. 74. Don Quixote's epitaph.

Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels) (1613)

 * Novelas ejemplares [Exemplary Novels] is a series of twelve novellas written between 1590 and 1612, the collection was published in Madrid in 1613.

La gitanilla (The Little Gypsy Girl)

 * No te asotiles tanto, que te despuntarás...
 * Don't put too fine a point to your wit for fear it should get blunted.

 * Para con ella es de cera mi alma, donde podrá imprimir lo que quisiere, y para conservarlo y guardarlo, no será como impreso en cera, sino como esculpido en mámoles, cuya dureza se opone á la duración de los tiempos.
 * For her my soul is of wax, where she can imprint whatever she pleases; and to preserve and guard it, it will not be as if imprinted in wax, but as if sculpted in marble, whose hardness withstands the passage of time.

 * Aun entre los demonios hay unos peores que otros, y entre muchos malos hombres suele haber alguno bueno.
 * Even among the fiends there are some worse than others, and among many bad men you may find one good.

 * Se dará tiempo al tiempo, que suele dar dulce salida a muchas amargas difficultades.
 * Time will be gained, and time usually provides a sweet ending for many bitter difficulties.

El licenciado Vidriera (The Lawyer of Glass)

 * Yo no soy bueno para palacio, porque tengo vergüenza y no sé lisonjear.
 * I am not suited to the palace, for I have self-respect and do not know how to flatter.

 * Los buenos artistas imitan la naturaleza; los malos, la vomitan.
 * Good painters imitate nature, bad ones vomit it.

 * Por las cosas que dicen que dije cuando loco, podéis considerar las que diré y haré cuando cuerdo.
 * By the things they say I did when I was mad, you can consider what I shall say and do when I am sane.

El coloquio de los perros (The Colloquy of the Dogs)

 * Vete a la lengua, que en ella consisten los mayores daños de la humana vida.
 * Control your tongue, for from it flow the greatest evils of human life.

 * Mueren muchos más de los confiados que de los recatados.
 * There die many more of the trustful than of the wary.

 * Ambición es, pero ambiciòn generosa, la del que pretende mejorar su estado sin perjuicio de tercero.
 * It is ambition, but a generous ambition, that seeks to improve one's status without harm to others.

 * Pocas o ninguna vez se cumple con la ambición que no sea con daño de tercero.
 * Rarely, if ever, can ambition be satisfied with no harm to another.

 * El andar en tierras y comunicar con diversas gentes, hace a los hombres discretos.
 * Traveling through different countries and communicating with different peoples makes men wise.

Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda) (1617)

 * En los grandes perigros, la poca esperanza de vencerlos saca del ánimo desesperadas fuerzas.
 * In great dangers, the small hope of overcoming them draws desperate strength from the spirit.
 * Book 1, Ch. 8.

 * Un buen arrepentimiento es la mejor medicina que tienen las enfermedades del alma.
 * A good repentance is the best medicine for diseases of the soul.
 * Book 1, Ch. 14.

 * Puede haber amor sin celos, pero no sin temores.
 * There can be love without jealousy, but not without fear.
 * Book 3, Ch. 19.

Quotes about Cervantes

 * While clearly a masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw — that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. ... Looming like one of the Don's chimerical adversaries, it is a giant...But the giant has a giant weight problem and is elderly, and soft-brained. Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.
 * Martin Amis, in his review of Don Quixote in Atlantic Monthly (March 1986); later in The War Against Cliche (2001)

 * Cervantes, Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
 * William Faulkner, Paris Review interview with Jean Stein (1956).

 * The Golden Age of Spain (mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries) saw a certain reaction against the generally antifemale attitude characteristic of the Middle Ages. Both Cervantes (1547-1616) and Lope de Vega (1562-1635) often depicted women not as weak, wicked, and lecherous, but as strong, heroic, and virtuous; and both admired their contemporary St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)...
 * Angel Flores and Kate Flores, Introduction to The Defiant Muse: Hispanic Feminist Poems (1986)

 * The biography of Cervantes provides an extremely typical example of what could befall a man living during the transition from romantic chivalry to realism. Without knowing this story it is impossible to appreciate Don Quixote sociologically. ... The parodying of chivalry was no new thing in his lifetime ... In Italy, where knighthood was represented to some extent by middle-class elements, the new chivalry did not take itself quite seriously. It was doubtless here, that Cervantes was prepared for his sceptical attitude, here in the home of liberalism and humanism, and it was to Italian literature that he probably owed the first suggestion for his epoch-making joke. His work was not intended, however, merely to take a rise out of the artificial and mechanical novels of fashion, nor to become merely a criticism of out-of-date chivalry, but also to be an indictment of the world of the disenchanted, matter-of-fact reality, in which there was nothing left for an idealist but to dig himself in behind his idée fixe. The novelty in Cervantes' work was, therefore, not the ironic treatment of the chivalrous attitude to life, but the relativizing of the two worlds of romantic idealism and realistic rationalism. What was new was the indissoluble dualism of his world-view, the idea of the impossibility of realizing the idea in the world of reality and of reducing reality to the idea. ... He wavers between the justification of un-worldly idealism and of worldly-wise common sense. From that arises his own conflicting attitude toward his hero. Before Cervantes there had only been good and bad characters, deliverers and traitors, saints and blasphemers, in literature; here the hero is saint and fool in one and the same person.
 * Arnold Hauser, in The Social History of Art  (1951), as translated by Stanley Godman, p. 399

 * Of all the books of fiction, I know none that equals Cervantes's History of Don Quixote in usefulness, pleasantry, and a constant decorum.
 * John Locke, 'Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman' (1703), A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, Never before printed, or not extant in his Works (1720), p. 244

 * It will probably never be possible to prove that Cervantes was a cristiano nuevo, but the circumstantial evidence seems compelling. The Instruccion written by Fernan Diaz de Toledo in the mid-fifteenth century lists the Cervantes family as among the many noble clans of Spain that were of converso origin.
 * Michael McGaha, in "Is There a Hidden Jewish Meaning in Don Quixote?" in the Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America (2004), discussing evidence of Jewish ancestry and influences.

 * Is there a better book about dreaming oneself into a new life?
 * Ilan Stavans about Don Quijote Interview (2021)

 * The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.
 * Miguel de Unamuno, "Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy," The Tragic Sense of Life (1913)

title: Miguel de Cervantes