“Facts are the enemy of truth.”

“The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”

“By the Blessed Virgin ! Is it possible that your grace is so thickheaded and so short on brains that you cannot see that what I'm telling you is the absolute truth.”

“It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.”

“What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?”

“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.”

“... he who's down one day can be up the next, unless he really wants to stay in bed, that is...”