Spanish poet and novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) wrote with quiet strength and unshakable grace.

In the early 1600s, even as debts loomed and fortunes faltered, he shaped Don Quixote, the adventures of a gaunt knight from La Mancha, and with these adventures, the heartbeat of the modern novel.

“You must live long in order to see much,” he said. His knight, armed more with dreams than steel, rides with loyal Sancho Panza to seek heroic adventures and challenge injustices. Windmills become giants, ordinary fields turn into kingdoms.

“Love not what you are but what you may become,” Cervantes urged. The novel’s vision invites us toward courage, optimism, and steady dedication to our most meaningful quests.

“That which costs little is less valued,” he wrote, reminding us that craft and character grow through patient work. And when the world calls vision madness, Quixote answers that too much sanity can be its own kind of folly — to see life as it should be is a holy daring.