A term you'll meet in Cervantes's Don Quixote.
Quixotic describes a goal or a person that is idealistic to the point of being impractical — pursuing something noble, romantic, or principled with a confidence the real world doesn't support. The word comes directly from Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (Part 1, 1605; Part 2, 1615), and it has carried a built-in ambiguity since the moment it entered English.
Alonso Quixano is an aging, minor Spanish nobleman who has read so many chivalric romances that he loses track of where fiction ends and his own life begins. He renames himself Don Quixote, recruits a practical-minded neighbor, Sancho Panza, as his squire, and sets out as a knight-errant to revive an age of chivalry that, crucially, never existed in the way the romances he loved described it.
The novel's most famous episode (Part 1, Chapter 8) has Don Quixote spot a row of windmills on the plain and declare them giants to be vanquished. He charges one with his lance; the sail catches it and flings him to the ground. "Tilting at windmills" — fighting imaginary enemies, or battling problems that don't actually exist as you've imagined them — comes directly from this scene, and it's the closest single moment to a definition of "quixotic" the novel offers.
Cervantes's novel is, on one level, a parody (see our entry on satire vs. parody) of chivalric romance — Don Quixote's confusions are repeatedly, sometimes cruelly, comic. But across both volumes, particularly the more reflective second part, Don Quixote's commitment to honor, justice, and generosity reads as genuinely admirable next to the cynicism, cruelty, and self-interest of the "sane" people around him. Cervantes builds a character who is simultaneously deluded and the most honorable person in the book — which is exactly why "quixotic" can be used as gentle mockery or as real admiration, often in the same sentence.
A "quixotic campaign" usually means one without a realistic chance of winning, pursued anyway out of principle. A "quixotic gesture" suggests nobility undercut by impracticality. Both senses are faithful to the novel, because Cervantes never resolved which reading was correct — he gave English a word that lets you praise someone's ideals and doubt their judgment in the very same breath.
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