Wanted: A dog that neither barks nor bites, eats broken glass and shits diamonds.

What then is your duty? What the day demands.

Sameness leaves us in peace but it is contradiction that makes us productive.

Is it not enough that we cannot make one another happy, must we also rob one another of the pleasures that any heart may permit itself now and then? And name me a person who in a bad mood will be decent enough to hide it, to bear it alone, without destroying the joy around him. Is it not rather an inner dissatisfaction with our own unworthiness, a dislike of ourselves that is always associated with envy aggravated by foolish conceit? We see people happy and not made happy by us, and that is unbearable.

So then the year is repeating its old story again. We are come once more, thank God! to its most charming chapter. The violets and the Mayflowers are as its inscriptions or vignettes. It always makes a pleasant impression on us, when we open again at these pages of the book of life.

Investigate what is, and not what pleases.

He who serves the public is a poor animal; he worries himself to death and no one thanks him for it.