Man of La Mancha

Man of La Mancha is a 1965 Broadway musical which tells the story of the classic novel Don Quixote as a play within a play, performed by Miguel de Cervantes and his fellow prisoners as he awaits a hearing with the Spanish Inquisition. A film version of it was made in 1972, starring Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren.

Cervantes

• I shall impersonate a man. His name is Alonso Quijana, a country squire no longer young. Being retired, he has much time for books. He studies them from morn till night and often through the night and morn again, and all he reads oppresses him; fills him with indignation at man's murderous ways toward man. He ponders the problem of how to make better a world where evil brings profit and virtue none at all; where fraud and deceit are mingled with truth and sincerity. He broods and broods and broods and broods and finally his brains dry up. He lays down the melancholy burden of sanity and conceives the strangest project ever imagined.... to become a knight-errant, and sally forth into the world in search of adventures; to mount a crusade; to raise up the weak and those in need. No longer will he be plain Alonso Quijana, but a dauntless knight known as Don Quixote de La Mancha.

• I am Don Quixote! The Man of La Mancha!

• I come in a world of iron to make a world of gold.

• The mission of each true knight is duty — nay — is privilege...
  To dream the impossible dream
  To fight the unbeatable foe
  To bear with unbearable sorrow
  To run where the brave dare not go.

  To right the unrightable wrong
  To love pure and chaste from afar
  To try when your arms are to weary
  To reach the unreachable star.

  • "The Impossible Dream" - YouTube video

• This is my quest —
  To follow that star
  No matter how hopeless
  no matter how far.
  To fight for the right
  Without question or pause
  To be willing to march into Hell
  For a heavenly cause.
  • "The Impossible Dream (The Quest)"

• And the world will be better for this
  That one man scorned and covered with scars
  Still strove with his last dance of courage
  To reach the unreachable star.
  • "The Impossible Dream (The Quest)"

• I have lived nearly fifty years, and I have seen life as it is. Pain, misery, hunger ... cruelty beyond belief. I have heard the singing from taverns and the moans from bundles of filth on the streets. I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle ... or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no gallant last words ... only their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question, "Why?"
  I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!