It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.

A beautifully constructed borshch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought.

Women and elephants never forget an injury.

To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.

The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.

I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.