There’s no striving against the stream; and the weakest still goes to the wall.

The saying expresses a fatalistic, proverb-like view of power and circumstance: some forces (the “stream”) are so strong that resistance is futile, and in any contest the vulnerable are the first to be overwhelmed (“the weakest…goes to the wall,” i.e., is driven into defeat). Read as Cervantine, it aligns with the recurrent tension in his fiction between ideal aspiration and harsh social reality—where noble intentions collide with entrenched structures, luck, and brute strength. The line can be taken as counsel toward prudence (choose battles wisely) or as a bleak observation about injustice: systems tend to crush those with the least protection.