Motherhood Quote by Miguel de Cervantes

Cervantes frames luck as lineage, not lottery: good fortune is "mothered" by diligence, while idleness is rendered sterile, incapable of producing anything but stalled desire. The move is rhetorically shrewd. By turning fortune into a dependent child rather than a capricious goddess, he steals glamour from chance and hands it to habit. It is both motivational and faintly accusatory: if your "best wishes" never arrive, the culprit is less the world than your own slackness.

The subtext is shaped by a life lived in the churn of early modern Spain, where empire projected power abroad while ordinary lives were battered by war, debt, and bureaucratic indifference. Cervantes knew the humiliation of external misfortune: captivity, poverty, professional disappointment. That biography makes the sentence read less like a pat self-help bromide and more like an argument for agency under unstable conditions. Diligence cannot prevent disaster, but it can keep desire from becoming mere fantasy. The "goal" is telling: wishes are not condemned, but they must be aimed, pursued, and dignified by effort.

As a novelist - and the author who made a comedy out of delusion and persistence in Don Quixote - Cervantes also understands the fine line between aspiration and self-deception. Idleness, in his moral universe, is not restful; it is the breeding ground for castles in the air. Diligence is the corrective that turns imagination into consequence, and the only kind of "luck" worth trusting.