Don Quixote

Don Quixote

by

Miguel de Cervantes

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Themes and Colors
Truth and Lies Theme Icon
Literature, Realism, and Idealism Theme Icon
Madness and Sanity Theme Icon
Intention and Consequence Theme Icon
Self-Invention, Class Identity, and Social Change Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Don Quixote, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Madness and Sanity Theme Icon

Quixote is considered insane because he “see[s] in his imagination what he didn’t see and what didn’t exist.” He has a set of chivalry-themed hallucinations. But then, they are not quite hallucinations, which by definition occur without any external stimulus. They are distorted perceptions of real objects and events. To see giants instead of windmills is, in a way, just a very peculiar interpretation of large, vaguely threatening objects in motion. And many other instances of Quixote’s madness – his rigid principles, his obsession with knighthood – are also peculiarities. The priest and the barber, who persecute Quixote in the guise of well-wishers trying to restore his sanity, are simply trying to stamp out his unsettling peculiarity. They are conducting a witch-hunt in the timeless manner of narrow-minded people threatened by strangeness.

Quixote’s madness is ambiguous and paradoxical, because he both and does not see; he sees the giants in his imagination, but he does not hallucinate giants in the world outside. His madness consists in his trusting his imagination over his perception, and his imagination is captivated by the values of chivalry books. His madness is a state of thrall to a coherent imagined world. But in the course of his adventures, that world loses its coherence: it is shaken by internal inconsistencies and by the world’s complications and contradictions. When Quixote declares on his deathbed that he is finally sane, he means that the imagined world has lost its grip on him, and he is left with a chilling blankness that cannot sustain him.

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Madness and Sanity ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Madness and Sanity appears in each chapter of Don Quixote. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Madness and Sanity Quotes in Don Quixote

Below you will find the important quotes in Don Quixote related to the theme of Madness and Sanity.
Part 1, Prologue Quotes

And to what can my barren and ill-cultivated mind give birth except the history of a dry, shriveled child, whimsical and full of extravagant fancies that nobody else has ever imagined – a child born, after all, in prison, where every discomfort has its seat and every dismal sound its habitation?

Related Characters: Cervantes (speaker)
Page Number: 2
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 1 Quotes

In short, our hidalgo was soon so absorbed in these books that his nights were spent reading from dusk till dawn, and his days from dawn till dusk, until the lack of sleep the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad. … The idea that this whole fabric of famous fabrications was real so established itself in his mind that no history in the world was truer for him.

Related Characters: Don Quixote de la Mancha
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 2 Quotes

And since whatever our adventurer thought, saw, or imagined seemed to him to be as it was in the books he’d read, as soon as he saw the inn he took it for a castle with its four towers and their spires of shining silver.

Related Characters: Don Quixote de la Mancha
Related Symbols: Inns
Page Number: 32
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 8 Quotes

But Don Quixote was so convinced that they were giants that he neither heard his squire Sancho’s shouts nor saw what stood in front of him.

Related Characters: Don Quixote de la Mancha, Sancho Panza
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 37 Quotes

Don Quixote was developing his arguments in such an orderly and lucid way that for the time being none of those listening could believe he was a madman.

Related Characters: Don Quixote de la Mancha
Related Symbols: Inns
Page Number: 355
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 45 Quotes

It is possible that, since you have not been knighted, as I have, the enchantments in this place do not affect you, and that your understanding is unclouded, and that you can form judgments about the affairs of the castle as they really and truly are, rather than as they appeared to me.

Related Characters: Don Quixote de la Mancha (speaker), The priest, The barber, Don Fernando, Barber 2
Related Symbols: Inns, Enchanters
Page Number: 420
Explanation and Analysis:

But one man had been plunged into the deepest depths of despair, and that was the barber, whose basin, there before his very eyes, had turned into Mambrino’s helmet, and whose pack-saddle, he was very sure, was about to turn into the splendid caparisons of some handsome steed.

Related Characters: Don Quixote de la Mancha, Barber 2
Related Symbols: Inns
Page Number: 420
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 48 Quotes

…whereas drama should, as Cicero puts it, be a mirror of human life, an exemplar of customs and an image of truth, there modern plays are just mirrors of absurdity, exemplars of folly and images of lewdness.

Related Characters: The priest (speaker), Don Quixote de la Mancha, The canon
Page Number: 444
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 17 Quotes

…he sometimes thought [Quixote] sane and sometimes mad, because what he said was coherent, elegant and well expressed, and what he did was absurd, foolhardy and stupid.

Related Characters: Don Quixote de la Mancha, Don Diego de Miranda
Page Number: 598
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 24 Quotes

I cannot bring myself to believe that everything recorded in this chapter happened to the brave Don Quixote exactly as described… Yet I can’t believe that Don Quixote was lying, because he was the most honest hidalgo and the noblest knight of his time: he couldn’t have told a lie to save himself from being executed. … so I merely record it, without affirming either that it is false or that it is true.

Related Characters: Cide Hamete Benengeli (speaker), Don Quixote de la Mancha
Page Number: 648
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 74 Quotes

My mind has been restored to me, and it is now clear and free, without those gloomy shadows of ignorance cast over me by my wretched, obsessive reading of those detestable books of chivalry. Now I can recognize their absurdity and their deceitfulness, and my only regret is that this discovery has come so late that it leaves me no time to make amends by reading other books that might be a light for my soul.

Related Characters: Don Quixote de la Mancha (speaker)
Page Number: 976
Explanation and Analysis:

You must congratulate me, my good sirs, because I am no longer Don Quixote de la Mancha but Alonso Quixano, for whom my way of life earned me the nickname of “the Good”. I am now the enemy of Amadis of Gaul and the whole infinite horde or his descendants; now all those profane histories of knight-errantry are odious to me; now I acknowledge my folly and the peril in which I was placed by reading them; now, by God’s mercy, having at long last learned my lesson, I abominate them all.

Related Characters: Don Quixote de la Mancha (speaker)
Page Number: 977
Explanation and Analysis: