“The pen is the tongue of the soul; as are the thoughts engendered there, so will be the things written.”

La pluma es la lengua del alma: cuales fueren los conceptos que en ella se engendraren, tales serán sus escritos.
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 16, as translated by Henry Edward Watts (1895).

Original

La pluma es lengua del alma; cuales fueren los conceptos que en ella se engendraron, tales serán sus escritos.

Variant: La pluma es la lengua del alma: cuales fueren los conceptos que en ella se engendraren, tales serán sus escritos.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 23, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The pen is the tongue of the soul; as are the thoughts engendered there, so will be the things written." by Miguel de Cervantes?
Miguel de Cervantes photo
Miguel de Cervantes 178
Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright 1547–1616

Related quotes

Maimónides photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“My tongue, not my pen, is my instrument.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Conversation with Thomas Jones (7 January 1946), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 540.
1940s

Charles Mackay photo

“Aid the dawning, tongue and pen;
Aid it, hopes of honest men!”

Charles Mackay (1814–1889) British writer

"Clear the Way".
Legends of the Isles and Other Poems (1851)

John Greenleaf Whittier photo

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"”

Bret Harte wrote a famous parody of this famous poem, "Mrs. Judge Jenkins" in which the Judge marries Maud, and which he ends with the lines:
Maud soon thought the Judge a bore,
With all his learning and all his lore;
And the Judge would have bartered Maud's fair face
For more refinement and social grace.
If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, "It might have been,"
More sad are these we daily see:
"It is, but hadn't ought to be".
Maud Muller (1856)
Context: Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

Henry James photo

“She is written in a foreign tongue.”

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

Thomas Paine photo
Marcus Garvey photo

“The pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is mightier than them both put together.”

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur
Pierre Corneille photo

“An example is often a deceptive mirror,
And the order of destiny, so troubling to our thoughts,
Is not always found written in things past.”

L'exemple souvent n'est qu'un miroir trompeur;
Et l'ordre du destin qui gêne nos pensées
N'est pas toujours écrit dans les choses passées.
Auguste, act II, scene i.
Cinna (1641)

P.G. Wodehouse photo

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.' (quoting John Greenleaf Whittier)”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

The Man Upstairs (1914)

William Cobbett photo

“As to the power which money gives, it is that of brute force, it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet, and of the bribed press, tongue and pen.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Letter 1, p. 36.
Advice to Young Men (1829)

Related topics