Miguel de Cervantes

Ley 1: Si uno ha acusado y ha embrujado a otro y no puede justificarse, es pasible de muerte.

"En efecto, yo entré desnudo en el gobierno y salgo desnudo dél; y así, podré decir con segura conciencia, que no es poco: "Desnudo nací, desnudo me hallo: ni pierdo ni gano"."

"Y manos a la obra, que en la tardanza dicen que suele estar el peligro".

...necio él, dura ella y vos no amante.

As regards your government of yourself and your household, Sancho, my first piece of advice is to be clean and to cut your fingernails, and not to let them grow long, as some people do, moved by ignorance to believe that long nails make their hand look beautiful, as if those appendages, those excrescences that they leave uncut have any right to be called fingernails at all, because they are more like talons of a kestrel: a monstrous and filthy abuse.

As soon as Don Quixote had read the inscription on the parchment he perceived clearly that it referred to the disenchantment of Dulcinea, and returning hearty thanks to heaven that he

There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things.

Desocupado lector, sin juramento me podrás creer que quisiera que este libro, como hijo del entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más gallardo y más discreto que pudiera imaginarse.

mis amores y los suyos han sido siempre platónicos, sin extenderse a más que a un honesto mirar.

Aun entre los demonios hay unos peores que otros, y entre muchos malos hombres suele haber alguno bueno.

The dead to the grave, the living to the loaf.

Where envy reigns virtue can't exist, and generosity doesn't go with meanness.

Well, the same thing happens in the drama and business of this world, where some play emperors, others pontiffs, in short, all the figures that can be presented in a play, but at the end, which is when life is over, death removes all the clothing that differentiated them, and are all equal in the grave.

In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind. His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, and other impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer. He would say that El Cid Ruy Díaz4 had

If a governor comes out of his government rich, they say he has been a thief; and if he comes out poor, that he has been a noodle and a blockhead.