80 Quixote Quotes

Following is our list of quixote quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

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Famous Quixote Quotes

To dream the impossible dream, to reach the unreachable star! — Joe Darion

Dream the impossible dream, Fight the unbeatable foe, Strive with your last ounce of courage, to reach the unreachable star. — Joe Darion

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible. — Miguel de Unamuno

Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible. — Robin Morgan

The madman is a dreamer awake — Sigmund Freud

Nothing is impossible to a valiant heart. — Henry IV of France

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd. - Miguel de Cervantes

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd. — Miguel de Cervantes

Tilting at windmills hurts you more than the windmills. - Robert A. Heinlein

Tilting at windmills hurts you more than the windmills. — Robert A. Heinlein

Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible. - Albert Einstein

Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible. — Albert Einstein

A hero is a man who does what he can. - Romain Rolland

A hero is a man who does what he can. — Romain Rolland

A man searching for paradise lost can seem a fool to those who never sought the other world. — Jim Morrison

A true knight is fuller of bravery in the midst, than in the beginning of danger. — Sir Philip Sidney

Nothing is impossible to the man who will — Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

Whoever plows with a team of donkeys must have patience. — Zimbabwean Proverbs

Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be. — Miguel de Cervantes

Short Quixote Quotes

  • Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad. — George Bernard Shaw
  • I want to be a guy, but I want to wear a lot of makeup. — Gwen Stefani
  • It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe. — James Gleick
  • Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote. — Stanislaw Lem
  • For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing. — Miguel de Cervantes
  • Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza. — Nicholas Tucker
  • Read Don Quixote; it is a very good book; I still read it frequently. — Thomas Sydenham
  • Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza. — Franz Kafka
  • Inside every Sancho Panza there's a Don Quixote struggling to get out. — P. J. O'Rourke
  • The three greatest fools (majaderos) of history have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote - and I! — Simon Bolivar

Quixote Image Quotes

Don Quixote Quotes

I knew that one day I would come to this point that I would make something so outrageous and so ambitious that... it'd be that Don Quixote feeling, that I'd have to tilt at a windmill. Sometimes you've got to do it. That's the only way you can do things. — Oliver Stone

A soprano in Massenet's Don Quixote complained that she had missed her entry in the aria, "because Mr. Challiapin always dies too soon." "Madam, you must be profoundly in error," said Sir Thomas, "No operatic star has yet died half soon enough for me." — Thomas Beecham

QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman's name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay. — Ambrose Bierce

As far as I am concerned, Don Quixote is the most metal fictional character that I know. Single handed, he is trying to change the world, regardless of any personal consequences. — Christopher Lee

Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.' — Arthur Smith

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. — Miguel de Cervantes

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad. — George Santayana

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. — W. H. Auden

Don Quixote thought he could have made beautiful bird-cages and toothpicks if his brain had not been so full of ideas of chivalry. Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

People Writing About Quixote

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes

440 3670
Read quotes by Miguel de Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno
quotes on education, life and death

110 772
Read quotes by Robin Morgan

Robin Morgan
quotes on education, leadership and civil war

68 421
Read quotes by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud
quotes on dreams, marriage and civilization

455 15250
Read quotes by Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein
quotes on democracy

658 4815
Read quotes by Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein
quotes on education, success and imagination

1931 58682

More Quixote Quotes

I hight don Quixote, I live on peyote, marijuana, morphine and cocaine. I never know sadness, but only a madness that burns at the heart and the brain. I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman, angelic, demonic, divine. Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon that brims with ambrosial wine. — Jack Parsons

In quixotically trying to conquer death doctors all too frequently do no good for their patients' ease but at the same time they do harm instead by prolonging and even magnifying patients' dis-ease. — Jack Kevorkian

Dare to change the world. There is nothing quixotic or romantic in wanting to change the world. It is possible. It is the age-old vocation of all humanity. I can't think of a better life than one dedicated to passion, to dreams, to the stubbornness that defies chaos and disillusionment. — Gioconda Belli

The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition. — Gregory Maguire

My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes. — Aaron Sorkin

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. — Robert McNamara

My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness. — Bonnie Jo Campbell

The strongest army in the world [the French] facing no more than twenty-six [German] divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated! — J. F. C. Fuller

I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail. — Lord Byron

When you think of the huge uninterrupted success of a book like Don Quixote, you're bound to realize that if humankind have not yet finished being revenged, by sheer laughter, for being let down in their greatest hope, it is because that hope was cherished so long and lay so deep! — Georges Bernanos

I've always wanted to play Don Quixote in some way. It's a great role. I think the idealism of the man shows that hope that we have in the human breast to achieve something. — Dominic Chianese

Don Quixote was a song for a 1969 Michael Douglas movie called Hail Hero! I wrote the title song for the film and they also used the Don Quixote one I had submitted. — Gordon Lightfoot

the English, although partakers in the most variable and quixotic climate in the world, never become used to its vagaries, but comment upon them with shock and resentment as if all their lives had been spent in the predictable monsoon. — Ruth Rendell

Stirner's political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. ... Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual's action. ... The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act. — John Carroll

Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process. — James Howard Kunstler

The image of the reporter as a nicotine-stained Quixote, slugging back Scotch while skewering city hall with an expose ripped out of a typewriter on the crack of deadline, persists despite munificent evidence to the contrary. — Paul Gray

I understand there are inevitable things that we have to go through: heartbreak, family problems. I don't feel like some Quixotic idiot who says, 'We don't have to feel pain.' No! Let's feel it, let's make it work for ourselves. But I want us all to be able to get past it. — Drew Barrymore

Turning, then, from this loathsome combination of church and state, and weeping over the follies of our fellow men, who yield themselves the willing dupes and drudges of these mountebanks, I consider reformation and redress as desperate, and abandon them to the Quixotism of more enthusiastic minds. — Thomas Jefferson

It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don't believe that it can physically be done, and the other half are doing it. — Winston Churchill

He believed in himself, believed in his quixotic ambition, letting the failures of the previous day disappear as each new day dawned. Yesterday was not today. The past did not predict the future if he could learn from his mistakes. — Daniel Wallace

All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure. — Michael Chabon

If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up. — Jodi Picoult

We are animals and we are made in this way and this is how we behave. I'm just kind of fascinated by how we can deny that we are animals and what our impact on the other animals is like, and how quixotic we can be in trying to assess what we've done in trying to correct it. — T.C. Boyle

There are two kinds of people in this world, my grandmother used to say: the Have's and the Have-not's, and she stuck to the Have's. And today, Señor Don Quixote, people are more interested in having than in knowing. An ass covered with gold makes a better impression than a horse with a packsaddle. — Miguel de Cervantes

Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress? — Samuel Johnson

Do not be afraid to love. Remember dear old Don Quixote, viewing the world with love. He saw many beautiful things no one else saw. Try being dear Don Quixote for a day. You'll see that love improves your vision and allows you to see more than your eye has ever seen before. But be forewarned: Those who look on the world with love will need a handkerchief, not to use as a blindfold, but to blow their nose and dry their tears. — Bernie Siegel

Modern man's capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity's capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction. — George Will

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