In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit. - Anton Chekhov

When the green garden, still wet with dew, is all sparkling in the sun and looks radiant with happiness, when there is a scent of mignonette and oleander near the house, when the young people have just come back from church and are having breakfast in the garden, all so charmingly dressed and gay, and one knows that all these healthy, well-fed, handsome people are going to do nothing the whole long day, one wishes that all life were like that.

Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.

There are in life such confluences of circumstances that render the reproach that we are not Voltaires most inopportune.