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Don Quixote   /dɑn kihˈoʊti/   Listen
Don Quixote

noun
1.
The hero of a romance by Cervantes; chivalrous but impractical.
2.
Any impractical idealist (after Cervantes' hero).






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Don Quixote" Quotes from Famous Books



... properties of the craft. He had portfolios full of sketches; against the wall stood pictures, finished and unfinished; on an easel was a half-painted picture representing a group taken from a modern novel. Most painters only draw scenes from two novels—the "Vicar of Wakefield" and "Don Quixote;" but Arnold knew more. The central figure was a girl, quite unfinished—in ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant

... forest of Ardenne, amongst whose enchanted labyrinths the heroes of Boyardo and Ariosto roved formerly in quest of adventures. I felt myself singularly affected whilst gazing upon a wood so celebrated in romance for feats of the highest chivalry; and, Don Quixote-like, would have explored its recesses in search of that memorable fountain of hatred, which (if you recollect the story) was raised by Merlin to free illustrious knights and damsels from the torments ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... laugh out at Don Quixote, and still you brood on him. The juxtaposition of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, the opposition of their natures most humorous. They are as different as the two hemispheres in the time of Columbus, yet they touch and are bound in one by laughter. The knight's great aims and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of the New, have been tasked in vain to devise an effective discipline and curb for this impatient colt. Paper Money either refuses to be ridden, and runs rampant away, or, if any one succeed in mounting him for a time, he performs a journey like that which Don Quixote took on the back of the famous Cavalino, or Winged Horse. In imagination he ascended to the enchanted regions,—but in reality he was only dragged through alternate gusts of fire and of cold winds, to find ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... Don Quixote! Well, you are altogether in the clouds above me. I can't understand ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... remunerations, therefore, a testoon, or one shilling. But many men will consider the same service ill paid by a thousand pounds. So, of the reimbursement for learning a language. Lord Camden is said to have learned Spanish, merely to enjoy Don Quixote more racily. Cato, the elder Cato, after abusing Greek throughout his life, sat down in extreme old age to study it: and wherefore? Mr. Coleridge mentions an author, in whom, upon opening his pages ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... leather chair, and several shelves of books, among them volumes of history and travel, a King James' Bible, Arrian's Epictetus, Sabatier's life of Saint Francis, the Meditations of Antoninus, bound in paper, and a Jervas translation of Don Quixote. Here Mr. Jeminy was at home; in the evening he smoked his pipe, and read from the pages of Cervantes, whose humor, gentle and austere, comforted his mind so often vexed by the ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan

... Goudouneche, a schoolmaster, and Polino. This last name had struck Louis Bonaparte. "Who is this Polino?" Morny had answered, "An ex-officer of the Shah of Persia's service." And he had added, "A mixture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza." These prisoners had been placed in Number Six Casemate. Further questions on the part of Louis Bonaparte, "What are these casemates?" And Morny had answered, "Cellars without air or daylight, twenty-four metres long, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo

... after the other. "And a game. And a white rabbit. And a woolly sheep—it winds up!" She gave it to Hattie. "And a hat—with roses on it! And rompers—I do hope she's not too big for rompers! These are blue, with a white collar. And 'Don Quixote'—fine pictures—it'll keep. And look!"—it was a train of cars. "Isn't it a darling? I could play with it myself! Just observe that smokestack! And—well, she can give it to her first beau. And, behold, a lizard! Its picture is on the box!" She waved it. "Made ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates

... "Don Quixote de la Mancha!" she said critically. "Well—we steal the boat and you pay for it afterward. The owner will think you are crazy, and if the Germans ever discover it they will take the money away from him by some legal process. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... us how they managed to shut up a smooth bore in this country," said Crosby gravely. "I wonder when we're going to have dinner. I suppose old Don Quixote will trot out some of his Senoritas. I want to see those choir girls that sang ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... the first. His knowledge of human nature was supreme, and his characters stand out as human beings, with a force and a truth which has not, I think, been within the reach of any other English novelist in any period. I know no character in fiction, unless it be Don Quixote, with whom the reader becomes so intimately acquainted as with Colonel Newcombe. How great a thing it is to be a gentleman at all parts! How we admire the man of whom so much may be said with truth! Is there any one of whom we feel more sure in this respect ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope

... is overlooked. Consider for a moment as not wholly unworthy of attention his mere versatility as a man of letters. Apart from Roderick Random and its successors, which gave him a European fame, he wrote a standard history, and a standard version of Don Quixote (both of which held their ground against all comers for over a century). He created both satirical and romantic types, he wrote two fine-spirited lyrics, and launched the best Review and most popular magazine ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... common sense, Halliday," said Davis, turning to his companion, "don't sit there like a clam; open up and say something to convince this Don Quixote who, because he himself, sees only windmills, cannot be persuaded that we have real dragons ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... like the Sail-rock near the island of St. Thomas, marvellously resembled a ship under sail. The captain of the frigate rubbed his eyes on beholding the unexpected vision, as much astonished as the chivalrous Don Quixote, who, after an unsuccessful contest with a squad of giants, found his enemies transformed into windmills. This rock was afterwards known as rock Donner or Donnerock, and will stand forever an imperishable monument ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... residences, stores, groceries, shoe-shops, drugstores, barns, and even the saloons, the while the idlers on the streets and the small boys were gawking at us, smiling in a half-suppressed way, and making quaint remarks in which we could see no wisdom nor humor. We had not come into the town, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, merely to furnish the villagers amusement. Applying our canes and straps forcibly to the haunches and rumps of our burros only seemed to embarrass the poor creatures, for you can readily see how they would reason the matter out from their own premises: If they ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser

... only theatre he knows. He is able to attend to the drama presented to him, and to be absorbed by it. He discusses the actors and their doings as though they were real personages. Effie Deans and Varley, Ophelia and Don Quixote, were for us creatures whom we knew. It was the same with later writers. Byron's poetry once more appealed to me by its revolutionary note, Shelley was interpreted afresh to me by these mountains which he would have loved. One incident I recollect ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... sprinkled along the edge of the water, like the grains of rice dropped by the princess in the story. Sometimes we see larger buildings on the mountain slopes, probably convents. I sit and wonder whether the farther peaks may not be the Sierra Morena (the rusty saw) of Don Quixote. I resolve that they shall be, and am content. Surely latitude and longitude never showed me any particular respect, that I should be ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various

... late the privilege of planting tobacco in Ireland, and tobacconists want paper. Let Mr. Wesley then come with me, as the curate and barber went to shave and bless the library of Don Quixote. All the old books, old canons, sermons, and so forth, tending to kindle feuds, or promote rancor, let us fling out at the windows. Society will lose nothing: the tobacconists will benefit by the spoils of antiquity. And if, upon mature ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... Rousillon, although the only place in the neighbourhood at which we could have slept in any comfort, somewhat resembled, in its general style, those recorded in Don Quixote, and afforded similar adventures. In the midst of our supper, (which was by no means a bad one of the kind), in burst a fat German woman in a transport of fury, who thought herself ill-used in the allotment of the rooms; squabbling in a very discordant key with ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... dear nephew, you may think that I have all this time been combating, or, rather, seeking to lay, a phantom of my own raising; that I have been making mole-hills into mountains; or, like Don Quixote, turning wind-mills into giants: but, in my long Oxford life, I have heard of so many instances of the silly behaviour of which I have been speaking, that I wish to put you on your guard against it. True manliness consists in adhering ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens

... drovers with forest ponies going for Waisford or Market Basing; the hospitality and interminable devotions of a hermit by a mossy crucifix on Two Manors Waste; one night alone in a ruined chapel on the top of a down:—of such were the encounters and events of his journey. He was no Don Quixote to make desperadoes or feats of endurance out of such gear; on the contrary, he persistently enjoyed himself. Sour beer wetted his lips dry with talking; leaves made a capital bed; the hermit, in the intervals of his prayers, remembered his own fighting days in the Markstake, and knew what ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... marvellous, extraordinary, unique—" Evelyn was nearly saying "divine Jeanne," but she stopped herself in time and substituted the word "saintly." "No one seems to me more real than this woman, no one in literature; not Hamlet, nor Don Quixote, not Dante himself starts out into clearer outline than this poor servant-girl—a goatherd in her childhood." And to the Prioress, who did not know the story of this poor woman, Evelyn told it, laying stress—as she naturally would— on Jeanne's refusal to marry a ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... to feel right and left, everywhere, but in vain. Whenever I caught anyone it always turned out to be Nanette or Marton, who at once discovered themselves, and I, stupid Don Quixote, instantly would let them go! Love and prejudice blinded me, I could not see how ridiculous I was with my respectful reserve. I had not yet read the anecdotes of Louis XIII, king of France, but I had read Boccacio. I kept on seeking in vain, reproaching her with her cruelty, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... us take a passing glance at some of the Pantomime subjects which our progenitors delighted in. They had not the continual ringing of the changes on half-a-dozen Pantomime subjects, as we have at present, but revelled in such attractions as "Harlequin Don Quixote," "The Triumph of Mirth, or Harlequin's Wedding," "The Enchanted Wood or Harlequin's Vagaries," "Hurly Burly, or the Fairy of the Wells," "Blue Beard, Black Beard, and Grey Beard," and many ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent

... languid region, where the grass-grown ways were traveled but by drowsy cattle, that, less waked than stirred by day, seemed to walk in sleep. Browse, they did not—the enchanted never eat. At least, so says Don Quixote, that ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... helping to decide whether any of the new assortment of coloured silks which they had just received at the shop would do to match a grey and black mousseline-delaine that wanted a new breadth, when a tall, thin, Don Quixote-looking old man came into the shop for some woollen gloves. I had never seen the person (who was rather striking) before, and I watched him rather attentively while Miss Matty listened to the shopman. The stranger wore a blue coat with ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... were mutual, or to be conciliated by kind offices; if the fondest affection were not so often repaid and chilled by indifference and scorn; if so many lovers both before and since the madman in Don Quixote had not 'worshipped a statue, hunted the wind, cried aloud to the desert'; if friendship were lasting; if merit were renown, and renown were health, riches, and long life; or if the homage of the world ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... the village, we repaired to the lowly mansion of the curate. I had hoped to find him some such personage as the curate in Don Quixote, possessed of shrewdness and information in his limited sphere, and that I might gain some anecdotes from him concerning the parish, its worthies, its antiquities, and its historical events. Perhaps I might have done so at any other time, but, unfortunately, the curate was something ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... plays the hypocrite. He likes praise, he likes to be talked about, he likes to know great people, and he no more cares to conceal his likings than Sancho Panza cared to conceal his appetite. Three pullets and a couple of geese were but so much scum, which Don Quixote's squire whipped off to stay his stomach till dinner-time. By the time Boswell was six-and-twenty he could boast that he had made the acquaintance of Adam Smith, Robertson, Hume, Johnson, Goldsmith, Wilkes, Garrick, Horace ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... composed of works written by women, in various languages, and this library amounted to nearly 32,000 volumes. We will not hazard any conjecture as to the proportion of these volumes which a severe judge, like the priest in Don Quixote, would deliver to the flames, but for our own part, most of these we should care to rescue would be the works of French women. With a few remarkable exceptions, our own feminine literature is made up of books which could have been better written by men—books which have the same relation to literature ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... he, Birdie and myself landed to inspect a Battalion of Australians (9th Battalion of the 3rd Brigade). I made them carry out a little attack on a row of windmills, and really, they did not show much more imagination over the business than did Don Quixote in a similar encounter. But the men are ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... with great attention. Dutch windmills do not at all resemble the decrepit mills I had seen in the previous year at La Mancha, which seemed to be extending their thin arms to implore the aid of heaven and earth. The Dutch mills are large, strong, and vigorous, and Don Quixote would certainly have hesitated before running atilt at them. Some are built of stone or bricks, and are round or octagonal like mediaeval towers; others are of wood, and look like boxes stuck on the summits of pyramids. Most of ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... the word "Poem" upon the title page of the original, has been generally compared to Don Quixote and to the Pickwick Papers, while E. M. Vogue places its author somewhere between Cervantes and Le Sage. However considerable the influences of Cervantes and Dickens may have been—the first in the matter of structure, the other in background, humour, and detail of characterisation—the predominating ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... philosopher, scientific discoverer, or poet, may happen to be rather mad: his powers may have been used up, like Don Quixote's, in their visionary or theoretic constructions, so that the reports of common-sense fail to affect him, or the continuous strain of excitement may have robbed his mind of its elasticity. It is hard for our frail mortality to carry the ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by his fashionless trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, with tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which made me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that shape will always give a man. He tried to place me geographically after he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still across the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... his preface to a translation of "Don Quixote," discusses the creative powers of different peoples. To the Spaniard Cervantes is awarded the first place in novel-writing, and to our own Shakespeare, of course, the transcendent rank ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... Company too—Don Quixote—the 4th Part: where those Snobs, the Duke and Duchess—(how vulgar Great Folks then, as now!) make a Fool and Butt of him. Cervantes should have had more respect for his own Creation: but, I suppose, finding ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald

... was not a real helmet; that was only a barber's basin because Cervantes wanted to laugh at Don Quixote. Rinaldo slew Mambrino and took his helmet, but Mambrino was a giant and his helmet was too large for Rinaldo, so Malagigi took it down into the laboratory of the inferno and ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones

... self-denial. No adventure ever came to one for the asking. He who starts on a deliberate quest of adventure goes forth but to gather dead-sea fruit, unless, indeed, he be beloved of the gods and great amongst heroes, like that most excellent cavalier Don Quixote de la Mancha. By us ordinary mortals of a mediocre animus that is only too anxious to pass by wicked giants for so many honest windmills, adventures are entertained like visiting angels. They come ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... for the exiles, however, is whimsically enough contrasted by an orthodox anxiety to justify the conduct of their own government. The reader may recollect a pertinent example in the story of Sancho's Moorish friend, Ricote. Don Quixote, part. 2, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... her mental development. She says that "at the age of eight, my father, whenever he was at home, kept me up and at his side till nine o'clock in the evening, to listen to him while he read aloud to the family Hume, or Shakspere, or Don Quixote, or Hudibras. Certainly I did not understand them, but some glances of celestial light reached my soul, and I caught from his magnetic sympathy some elevation of feeling, and that love of reading which has been to me an education." A modern ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... ground is one mass of rocks and cactus and ravines down which these English go with an ease that makes me tremble with admiration. We had not come out to follow, so we, being quite soaked through and very hungry, went to an inn and it was such an inn as Don Quixote used to stop at, with the dining-room over the stable and a lot of drunken muleteers in the court and beautiful young women to wait on us. It is a beautiful country Spain, with every sort of green you ever dreamed of. We had omelettes and native wine and black bread and ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... it often in the papers, and had heard it in the drawing-rooms of all her friends. He who bore it seemed to her, after what she had heard a great personage. He was, according to his reputation, a hero of another age, a social Don Quixote, a terribly fast man of the world. He was one of those men whose lives astonish common people, whom the well-to-do citizen thinks faithless and lawless, whose extravagant passions overleap the narrow bounds of social prejudice; a man who tyrannizes over others, whom all fear, ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau

... intend to remain a blunder-headed fool defending a girl who does not desire any defence—a Don Quixote tilting at wind-mills. That is your choice, ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish

... the fingers of her memory. They never varied. On the top shelf the Bible and the works of Plautus and Diderot; on the second from the top the plays of Shakespeare in a blue edition; on the third from the bottom Don Quixote, in four volumes, covered with brown paper; a green Milton; the "Comedies of Aristophanes"; a leather book, partially burned, comparing the philosophy of Epicurus with the philosophy of Spinoza; and in a yellow binding Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... science. Defoe and Cervantes show a like intelligent insight as to medicine; and it was not without reason that Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, advised a student of medicine who entered his office as a student to begin the study of medicine by the careful study of "Don Quixote," remarking that he found it a work of great value, which he still often read. The works of Bacon and of Adam Smith on "Moral Sentiments;" the famous treatise on the "Natural History of Man," by the Rev. John Adams; the later ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... one this place of discipline brings his own lesson. It stirs Latude or Baron Trenck into heroic action; it is a hermitage for pious and conformable spirits. Beranger tells us he found prison life, with its regular hours and long evenings, both pleasant and profitable. The "Pilgrim's Progress" and "Don Quixote" were begun in prison. It was after they were become (to use the words of one of them), "Oh, worst imprisonment—the dungeon of themselves!" that Homer and Milton worked so hard and so well for the profit of mankind. In the year ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... rebellion against the "despotism of fact" more marked, but simply because he had to name a par- ticular Provencal city. Tartarin is a hunter of lions and charmer of women, a true "produit du midi," as Daudet says, who has the most fantastic and fabulous adventures. He is a minimized Don Quixote, with much less dignity, but with equal good faith; and the story of his exploits is a little masterpiece of the light comical. The Tarasconnais, however, declined to take the joke, and opened the vials of their wrath upon the mocking child of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... word is in everybody's mouth, nowadays. Pray, what do you understand by a gentleman, Mons. Fortunat? No doubt, you mean a heroic idiot who passed through life with a lofty mien, clad in all the virtues, as stoical as Job, and as resigned as a martyr—a sort of moral Don Quixote, preaching the austerest virtue, and practising it? But, unfortunately, nobility of soul and of purpose are expensive luxuries, and I am a ruined man. I am no saint! I love life and all that makes ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... mere counterfeit patent, which, nevertheless, makes many a country justice tremble. Don Quixote's water-mills are still Scotch bagpipes to him. He sends challenges by word of mouth, for he protests (as he is a gentleman and a brother of the sword) he can neither write nor read. He hath run through divers parcels of land, and great houses, beside both the counters. ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... eye fell on him as he went off like a fifth act. His Don Quixote face struck her. She had seen ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... chance of enjoying a British surgeon's tender mercies, for the sake of men, who, perhaps, could not live anyway. Allen, you always were a good-natured Don Quixote." ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various

... the streets, stopping before any building which caught our interest; staring up at the windows behind which Cervantes wrote part of "Don Quixote" when he had come back from slavery; admiring the graceful mirador of that corner house where Philip the Second was born; ("Much too good for him, since the world would have been better if he hadn't been born at all," said Dick, who has Dutch ancestors ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... my brilliant son!" said the mother. "Next in order comes my second jewel. Now Dulcinea Ophelia Ambrosia Josephine, my adored remembrance of Don Quixote, Shakspeare, the Naiads, and the mighty Napoleon, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... With what heart Don Quixote rode forth to tilt at sheep and windmills, and again with what heart in that saddest of all last chapters he bade his friends look not for this year's birds ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... but he was sensitive to rhetoric; and he listened with pleasure while Athelny, with picturesque expressions and the fire of a real enthusiasm, described to him the rich delight of reading Don Quixote in the original and the music, romantic, limpid, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... have been benign. In June, 1792, Lafayette, who commanded the army of the North, came to Paris and not only ventured to lecture the Assembly on its duty, but offered to take Louis to his army, who would protect him against the Jacobins. The court laughed at Lafayette as a Don Quixote, and betrayed his plans to the enemy. "I had rather perish," said the Queen, "than be saved by M. de Lafayette and his constitutional friends." And in this she only expressed the conviction which the caste to which she belonged held of their duty. ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams

... should they fail, would, like another Don Quixote, with lance in rest, charge the enemy, and release the captive knight, herself," said ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... cavalry charge," I admitted, laughing and looking at my horse, "unless, indeed, it were under Don Quixote's banner!" ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens

... name of the squire and companion of Don Quixote in the Spanish poet's Cervantes's romance; trans. ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel

... stand upon the borderland between the epic and the novel. "Don Quixote" is, for instance, such a work. It is epic in that it sums up and expresses the entire contribution of Spain to the progress of humanity. It is resumptive of the nation that produced it: all phases of Spanish life and character, ideals and temperament, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... Eusebius, you would have spared Don Quixote's whole library, and have preferred committing the curate to the flames. Your dreams, even your day-dreams, have hurried you ever far off and away from the beaten turnpike-road of life, through forests of enchantment, to rescue beauty which you never saw, from knight-begirt and dragon-guarded ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... and yet not have the strength to fit wings to his visions; he may live fruitlessly and die unpraised, with the thought that he has lost two birds in the hand for one which is not even in the bush. He may turn out a mere Don Quixote, helmeted with a barber's basin and tilting against windmills; but he could not choose otherwise, and he has paid a heavier price for his failure than many a man ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... houses (in the upper stories of which lights were burning), for the purpose of being set right, but we were either disregarded or not heard. A horrid squalling of cats, from the tops of the houses and dark corners, saluted our ears, and I thought of the night arrival of Don Quixote and his squire at Toboso, and their vain search amongst the deserted streets for the palace of Dulcinea. At length we saw light and heard voices in a cottage at the other side of a kind of ditch. Leading the horses over, we called at the door, which was opened by an aged man, who ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... those days, you see, they were not afraid of long titles. The book, too, is long. "Yet," as another great writer says,* "was there ever anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, except Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... Progress," "Robinson Crusoe," and "Gulliver's Travels" were all written by men of the British Isles, but our fourth book, "Don Quixote," was written by a Spaniard named Cervantes. He was a soldier part of his life and as valiant a fighter as his own hero. For five years he was a prisoner of war; he was poor and sick and in one trouble after another; but he was ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan

... governor, Don Sancho Panza, but which is now known by all to be connected with the mainland. Pleasant pastures slope down to the water, and if we were closer in shore you might chance to see Rozinante, the famous charger of Don Quixote de la Mancha, grazing amicably with the horse that brought the good news from Ghent ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews

... times almost froze the blood within her. And yet the worst had not arrived! Twice she had tried to escape from this enforced pilgrimage, but had failed utterly. Jim had brought her back by brute force. She became aware of the difficulties that faced her. She was his wife—his property. Had any modern Don Quixote felt like rescuing a beautiful woman in distress, he might well have hesitated at sight of the husband. As civilization was left behind so ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild

... at breakfast he narrated all his adventures, and told who were at the dinner party, and described two fine ladies' dresses—for the doctor had skill in millinery, though it was as little known as Don Quixote's talent for making bird-cages and tooth-picks, confided, as we remember, in one of his conversations with honest Sancho, under the cork trees. He told her his whole innocent little budget of gossip, in his own simple, pleasant way; and his little Lily sat looking on her beloved old man, and smiling, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... Beecher-Stowe has wrung tears from your eyes? I read her once, and six months ago read her again with the object of studying her—and after reading I had an unpleasant sensation which mortals feel after eating too many raisins or currants.... Read "Don Quixote." It is a fine thing. It is by Cervantes, who is said to be almost on a level with Shakespeare. I advise my brothers to read—if they haven't already done so—Turgenev's "Hamlet and Don Quixote." You won't understand it, my dear. If you want to read a book of travel ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... Kaiser's nose[B]: he contented himself with milder surprises and humbler profits, making his daily effort, doing evil from day to day and doing a little good as well, naturally and for the love of the thing, like a whimsical and compassionate Don Quixote. ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc

... phlegm; I had Napoleon's egotism, Galahad's purity, Lancelot's passion, Tristram's melancholy. I reasoned like Socrates and made Phaedo weep; I persuaded like Saint Paul and saw the throng on Mars' Hill sway to my words. I was by turns Don Juan and Don Quixote, Tom Jones and Mr. Allworthy, Hamlet and his uncle, young Shandy and his. You will gather that I was a reader. I was, and the people of my books stepped out of their pages and inhabited me. Or, to change the figure, I found in every book an open ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... the man in charge of the runcies or rouncies, is less obvious. Rouncy, a nag, is a common word in Mid. English. It comes from Old Fr. roncin (roussin), and is probably a derivative of Ger. Ross, horse. The Spanish form is rocin, "a horse or jade" (Minsheu, 1623), whence Don Quixote's charger ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley

... Collation: ^4A-2O^8, paged. Wanting 4 (second leaf of preface). Epistle dedicatory to the Lord of Walden, signed by the translator, Thomas Shelton. Author's preface to the reader. Sonnets in praise of Don Quixote. Table of contents. Text in four books. More poems on Don Quixote. The first part originally appeared in 1612; this is the second ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg

... what route the vanquished lion was growling his way to his den. With a hundred irregular horse, furnished him by Osman Aga, he set out on a foray beyond Jordan; and we do not wonder his two friends, Captain Lane, a Prussian edition of Don Quixote, and Mr Hunter, who has written an excellent account of his expedition to Syria, besides his old Beyrout friend Giorgio, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... old riding-boots. Hitherto, Sundown had been too preoccupied with culinary matters to pay much attention to his clothing. Incidentally he was spending not a little time in getting accustomed to his spurs, which he wore upon all occasions, clinking and clanking about the cook-room, a veritable Don Quixote ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... not read, sir,' answered Don Quixote, 'the annals and histories of England, wherein are recorded the famous exploits of King Arthur, whom in our Castilian tongue we always call King Artus; of whom there goes an old tradition, and a common one all over that kingdom of Great Britain, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various

... affairs are the same. This sentence assumed that they are all the same. To Eugene, the poet living in a world of imagination and abhorring reality, Candida was what Dulcinea was to Don Quixote. G.B.S.] ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... Charles Sumner, in an elaborate and powerful oration in the Senate, denounced slavery, "the sum of all villainies," and bitterly satirized one of its prominent defenders, Senator Butler of South Carolina. He compared Butler to Don Quixote, enamored of slavery as was the knight of his Dulcinea, and unconscious that instead of a peerless lady she was but a wanton. The response to the speech was made by a nephew of Senator Butler and member of the House, Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina. He entered the Senate chamber ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... That was in the bargain, if it had to be done. Two-thirds of us are dead, already, a damn sight better men than I am! We've been dying right along, from the beginning of this crack-brained Don Quixote crusade. That's all right. But, faith! now that it's my turn to die, by the holy saints I'm going to be well paid ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... knight-errantry. These tales of frontier life are, however, as a rule, characterized by such wildness of fancy and such extravagancy of language that we have often wondered why another Cervantes did not ridicule our border romances by describing a second Don Quixote's adventures on the prairies. We are pleased to notice, that in the new series of Frontier Tales, by Lee & Shepard, there is an agreeable absence of sensational writing, of that maudlin sentimentality which make the generality of such ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic

... a great discovery. Books could be borrowed from other people. One of his schoolmates came to school with a wonderful illustrated copy of "Don Quixote" arranged for children. Keith went into ecstasies over it. The mail-clad figure of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance on the front cover was to him the beckoning guardian of a world of wonders, ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman

... of Toledo also make glistening glazed tiles. Some of these show scenes from the lives of favorite Spanish heroes, real and imaginary. There are some Toledo tiles that will tell you about Don Quixote of La Mancha, a hero invented 350 years ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day

... kind of father, who blustered at you and made you feel respectful. I wanted him to have adventures, like Don Quixote, and make you thrilly all up and down ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke

... cursed them, checking such of them off by name as he recognized, setting them down in his memory for the vengeance he declared he would return speedily and exact. There he stood, like Don Quixote in his cage, his red eye to the hole, swearing as terribly as any man that marched in that hard-boiled army in Flanders ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden

... to tell the story of the Christ, the natives exclaimed 'El Dorado'—the golden. The ignorant sailors and adventurers seized upon the literal meaning, instead of the spiritual one. The time, being that of Don Quixote and of the Inquisition, accounts for the childish credulity on one side and the unparalleled ferocity on the other. The search for El Dorado, whether it was believed to be a fabulous country of gold, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... neighbours, or their rebellion against the "despotism of fact" more marked, but simply because he had to name a particular Provencal city. Tartarin is a hunter of lions and charmer of women, a true "produit du midi," as Daudet says, a character of the most extravagant, genial comedy. He is a minimised Don Quixote, with much less dignity but with equal good faith; and the story of his exploits is a little masterpiece of the free fantastic. The Tarasconnais, however, declined to take the joke, and opened the vials of their wrath upon the mocking child ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... would bleed afresh in the presence of his murderer. The passage in our text is interesting as being the earliest literary reference to the belief. Other instances will be found in Shakespear ("King Richard III., Act. I., Sc. 2), Cervantes ("Don Quixote"), Scott ("Ballads"), and Schiller ("Braut von Messina"). In the 15th and 16th centuries especially, the bleeding of the dead became in Italy, Germany, France, and Spain an absolute or contributory proof of guilt in the eyes of the law. The suspected culprit might be subjected ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... over her banjo for the absence of her Conrad—the Princesse Fleur de Marie (of Rudolstein and the Mysteres de Paris) was sadly ogling out of the bars of her convent cage, in which, poor prisoned bird, she was moulting away,—Dorothea of Don Quixote was washing her eternal feet:—in fine, it was such an elegant gallery as became a gallant lover of the sex. And in Sibwright's sitting-room, while there was quite an infantine law library clad in skins of fresh new-born calf, there was a tolerably large collection ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Don Quixote was always of opinion that this famous king did not die, but that he was changed into a raven by enchantment and that the English are momentarily expecting his return. Be this as it may, it is certain that when he reigned here all was harmony and joy. The browsing herds passed ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... several strange gentlemen, who each had a newspaper that he turned over eagerly, and Bertie could not help wishing that he too had something to read, though I think he would have preferred either Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe. Then he fell to wondering what Eddie and Agnes were doing: whether they were on the beach reading or sketching, and thinking how nice it would be to meet them at the station on next Saturday afternoon, when they purposed returning home, have the cabs all ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... eyes they are for glory. The Empress Catherine of Russia had eyes of this hue. In Don Quixote green eyes ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara

... sheered past me at a gallop. Through the coach window by the shine of the moon I caught one fleeting glimpse of a white frightened girl-face, and over the mouth was clapped a rough hand to stifle any cry she might give. I am no Don Quixote, but there never was a Montagu who waited for the cool second thought to crowd out the strong impulse of the moment. I made a dash at the step, missed my footing, and rolled over into the mud. When I got to my feet again ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine

... They are all original, and have the air of being drawn from his personal experience and observation. Ticknor, in his "History of Spanish Literature," says of them, and of the "Impertinent Curiosity," inserted in the first part of Don Quixote:— ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... humour for jesting, it might have been thought. But this was not the case with Tesse. He found time to write to Pontchartrain all the details of the war and all that passed amongst our troops in the style of Don Quixote, of whom he called himself the wretched squire and the Sancho; and everything he wrote he adapted to the adventures of that romance. Pontchartrain showed me these letters; they made him die with laughing, he admired them so; and in truth they were very comical, and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... might put them both at forty; grizzled men, pursed about the eyes with seafaring. And now that I came to look, the three rowers forward, though mere lads, repeated their elders' features and build; the gaunt frame, the long, serious face, the swarthy complexion and meditative eye—in short, Don Quixote of la Mancha at various stages of growth. Men and lads, I remarked, wore ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a modern Tyburn, but this and other tragic suggestions lacked conviction when confronted with his verdicts given as Justice of the Peace. He pronounced judgments in a grand and airy fashion, but as if he were speaking by a card, the Don Quixote whose mercy would be vaster than his wrath. This was the impression he gave, to, John Osgood on the day when the young squatter introduced himself to Rahway, where he had come on a mission to its one official. The young man's father had a taste for many ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the Argenis had fallen from his hands. Rabelais and Marot were the perpetual favourites of La Fontaine; from one he borrowed his humour, and from the other his style. Quevedo was so passionately fond of the Don Quixote of Cervantes, that often in reading that unrivalled work he felt an impulse to burn his own inferior compositions: to be a sincere admirer and a hopeless rival is a case of authorship the hardest imaginable. Few writers can venture to anticipate the award ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... real Gloria had a far different part to play. Every morning, with a terrible reality at her heart, she glanced over the newspapers for news of John Storm. She had not far to look. A sort of grotesque romance had gathered about him, as of a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills. His name was the point of a pun; there were cartoons, caricatures, and all other forms of the joke that is not a joke ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... 1066, when William the Conqueror became King of England. PARTY-COLORED MERRY ANDREW: an old term for a clown dressed in garments having several colors. FALSTAFF: an important character in several of Shakespeare's plays. He is always represented as fat and ridiculous. DON QUIXOTE: the chief character of the celebrated Spanish satire "Don Quixote" (1605) by Cervantes. Don Quixote is a simple-minded man, whose head has been turned by reading the extravagant romances of chivalry then current, in which knights ride forth to redress wrongs. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... age with Lope de Vega, obtained a wider celebrity. Don Quixote, during the life of its ill-requited author, was naturalized in countries where the name of Lope de Vega was not known, and Du Bartas was translated into the language of every reading people. But no writer ever has enjoyed such ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous

... the time when M. Zola was thus portraying the life of Provence, his great contemporary, bosom friend, and rival for literary fame, the late Alphonse Daudet, should have been producing, under the title of "The Provencal Don Quixote," that unrivalled presentment of the foibles of the French Southerner, with everyone nowadays knows as "Tartarin of Tarascon." It is possible that M. Zola, while writing his book, may have read the instalments of "Le Don ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... come to the door of his box, I was astounded to see slouching lazily in a corner with eyes closed, the nigh hip dropped low, a horse that at first glance appeared to be Don Quixote's Rosinante reincarnate, a gigantic "crow-bait" with a head as long and coarse as an eighteen-hand mule's, an under lip pendulous as a camel's dropping ears nearly long enough to brush flies off his nostrils, ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... 'In this book you will read of men who, like Don Quixote, were often mistaken but never mean, and of women, such as Una and Bradamante, who kept patient and true, in spite of fierce trials and temptations. I have only related a few of their adventures, but when you grow older you can read them for yourselves, in the ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various

... interest in pedantic journals of the blockades laid by the Duke of A. to the hearts of the Marquise de B. and the Comtesse de C. This trash Walpole extols in language sufficiently high for the merits of Don Quixote. He wished to possess a likeness of Crebillon; and Liotard, the first painter of miniatures then living, was employed to preserve the features of the profligate dunce. The admirer of the Sopha and of the Lettres Atheniennes ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Don Quixote! And so he had done that strange, fantastic thing for her—and she had given the money away to Don! Joan stopped at the foot of the stairway, her face colorless and unbelieving, her mind casting up a vivid picture of the night of search ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... his own eloquence, who, without evil intent, or love of deceit, or any instinct of scheming or false trading, seeks to embellish his own life, and other people's, with stories he knows to be illusions, but which he wishes were true? Is Don Quixote a liar? Are all the poets deceivers who aim to free us from realities, to go soaring off into space? After all, among southerners, there is no deception. Each one, within himself, restores things ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer

... of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrick Knickerbocker,' has perhaps shaken as many sides and helped digest as many dinners as almost any book since Cervantes gave the world his account of the adventures of his knight Don Quixote, and yet this great historical work hints but a part of that picture, though doubtless greatly improved by the author's delicate touches, which would pass before us in a procession illustrating two centuries of New York's history. Using such hints, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... with translations—I'm thankful that I kept some of my Latin from Grey Friars;" and he quoted sentences from the Latin Grammar, apropos of a hundred events of common life, and with perfect simplicity and satisfaction to himself. Besides the above-named books, the Spectator, Don Quixote, and Sir Charles Grandison formed a part of his travelling library. "I read these, sir," he used to say, "because I like to be in the company of gentlemen; and Sir Roger de Coverley, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Don Quixote are the finest gentlemen in ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the security of Germany against Austria's ambitious love of territorial aggrandizement! I cannot and I will not suffer that the house of Habsburg should strive for unjust possession in Germany, and appropriate Bavaria to herself while a lawful heir exists. I well know that I play the role of Don Quixote, and am about to fight for the rights of Germany as the Chevalier de la Mancha fought for his Dulcinea del Toboso. Mais, que voulez-vous, it is necessary for my fame and repose that I enter the arena ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... not betray their names and had nothing to say when somebody talked severely of their carelessness but "Oh, oh, young blood, young blood." I never saw him in the least disturbed or angry with anything the boys said or did except on one occasion. Henry Whitney said, in reciting in Don Quixote, in the course of some discussion, "By Jingo, Mr. Sales." Sales was struck with horror. He said it was the most horrible phrase that ever came from the lips of mortal man, and he should think the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... a Don Quixote appeared, and every mask in the room was eager to point out to him the imprisonment ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney

... of the capital of Iceland was through a chilling rain. A more desolate-looking place I had rarely if ever seen, though, like Don Quixote's market-woman on the ass, it was susceptible of improvement under the influence of an ardent imagination. As a subject for the pencil of an artist, it was at least peculiar, if not picturesque. ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... by those quacks and impostors who live upon the ideas of others. Thus I shame to tell how the sage Cid Hamet Benengeli was induced by one Juan Avellaneda to play the Turk with the ingenious Miguel Cervantes, and to publish a Second Part of the adventures of his hero the renowned Don Quixote, without the knowledge or co-operation of his principal aforesaid. It is true, the Arabian sage returned to his allegiance, and thereafter composed a genuine continuation of the Knight of La Mancha, in which the said Avellaneda ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... a fact which may be ascribed to the sentimentality and mere fantastics with which the kernels of his wit are overburdened. It is certain that no German humorous work can be compared with those great originals in that kind, Gil Blas and Don Quixote, or even with the much inferior works of Smollett and Dickens. Baron Sternberg's last effort forms no exception to this remark, and there is little hope that the second and concluding volume, whose appearance in Germany ought to be made by this time, will prove ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various



Words linked to "Don Quixote" :   character, fictitious character, fictional character, idealist, dreamer



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