Daily Inspiration Quote by Miguel de Cervantes

Cervantes is smuggling a dare inside a shrug. "Attempt the absurd" isn’t motivational-poster bravado; it’s an authorial credo from the man who made a middle-aged nobody put on a helmet of dubious origins and start tilting at windmills. The line works because it treats "the impossible" as a real destination while admitting the only road there looks ridiculous from the outside. You don’t get new worlds by behaving with the decorum of people who plan to be understood.

The subtext is a critique of respectable realism. In Cervantes' Spain, empire and orthodoxy advertised certainty, while daily life was full of bureaucratic absurdity, economic strain, and the grinding theater of honor. Against that backdrop, "absurd" becomes a kind of moral and artistic permission slip: to act out of sync with consensus, to risk public embarrassment, to try on an identity larger than your station. It’s also a quiet defense of fiction itself, the most "absurd" attempt of all: inventing falsehoods to tell the truth.

Cervantes knew failure intimately - soldier, prisoner, tax collector, perpetual striver - so the sentence carries experience rather than romance. He’s arguing that progress, whether personal or cultural, is often indistinguishable from folly until it succeeds. The impossible doesn’t announce itself with credentials. It arrives wearing comic armor, asking you to look stupid long enough to become right.