“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

Table-Talk (1857)

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 202

American poet 1807–1882

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“Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.”

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“Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul?”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

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Context: Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho at his side, inward and heroic too — and tell me if you find anything comic in the tragedy.

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“What is this thing called the existence? Is it all the things that we perceive it to be? Or is it something else? It's a gift. One of my favorite examples is the bird in the cage. You may think that you own the bird inside the cage, but you're wrong. You only own the cage. People think that they need to have a very fancy cage, that the more incredible the cage, the more incredible the bird will look. But the cage and the bird are really two different things. When the bird is gone, all that will be left is the cage.”

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“While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw - that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75 per cent of the whole), inhumanly dull…. 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 but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.”

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