Widely considered as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world’s pre-eminent novelists Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29th 1547 in Alcalá de Henares to Barber Surgeon father and a mother who had been sold into wedlock to stave off her family’s ruination leaving Cervantes and his siblings destined to grow up in poverty.
Cervantes joined the Infantería de Marina where during a battle he was shot three times rendering his left arm useless. Never able to support himself through his writing alone Cervantes worked as a tax collector, was imprisoned at least twice (1597 and 1602) for irregularities in his accounts and where it is believed that Don Quixote was ‘engendered’. Often dubbed El príncipe de los ingenios here we have 10 chivalrous quotes from Miguel de Cervantes.
Don Quixote is cited as the first classic model of the modern romance or novel; published in two volumes it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published and upon its publication was immediately pirated which resulted in Cervates’ inability to survive on his literary earnings.
Cited by the Bokklubben World Library collection as the authors’ choice for the “best literary work ever written” it is a novel that should be present on every bibliophile’s bookshelf.
“The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”
“There is no book so bad…that it does not have something good in it.”
“For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.”
“Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.”
“What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman’s mind?”
“… he who’s down one day can be up the next, unless he really wants to stay in bed, that is.”
“Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.”
“A bad year and a bad month to all the backbiting bitches in the world!”
“Wit and humour do not reside in slow minds.”
“There is a remedy for everything except death.”
Although Cervantes’ death is widely accepted as being April 23, 1616 he did in fact die on the 22nd of April. He was buried Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians, in central Madrid. In 1673 Cervantes’ bones went missing when building work was done at the convent and in 2014 Fernando de Prado a Spanish historian began a project to rediscover the author’s remains.
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