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marble
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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of
marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.
I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.
                -- Augustus Caesar
But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery -- go!
                -- Mark "The Bard" Twain
"The fronting for the eighty-yard long marble-topped bar
had been made by stitching together nearly twenty thousand
Antarean Mosaic Lizard skins, despite the fact that the
twenty thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep
their insides in."

- The Book decribing Milliways' politically incorrect
decor.
ZAPHOD        Hey, this rock...
FORD        Marble...
ZAPHOD        Marble...
FORD        Ice-covered marble...
ZAPHOD        Right... it's as slippery as... as... What's the
slipperiest
        thing you can think of?
FORD        At the moment? This marble.
ZAPHOD        Right. This marble is as slippery as this marble.

- Zaphod and Ford trying to get a grip on things in
Brontitall, Fit the Tenth.
It looked like something resembling white marble, which was
probably what it was: something resembling white marble.
                -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"
For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble:
and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.
                -- Sir Thomas More
        They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even
drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man.  These things offer
pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which
demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and
sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams -- and still calls for more.
        They are fools that think otherwise.  No great effort was ever bought.
No painting, no music, no poem, no cathedral in stone, no church, no state was
ever raised into being for payment of any kind.  No parthenon, no Thermopylae
was ever built or fought for pay or glory; no Bukhara sacked, or China ground
beneath Mongol heel, for loot or power alone.  The payment for doing these
things was itself the doing of them.
        To wield onself -- to use oneself as a tool in one's own hand -- and
so to make or break that which no one else can build or ruin -- THAT is the
greatest pleasure known to man!  To one who has felt the chisel in his hand
and set free the angel prisoned in the marble block, or to one who has felt
sword in hand and set homeless the soul that a moment before lived in the body
of his mortal enemy -- to those both come alike the taste of that rare food
spread only for demons or for gods."
                -- Gordon R. Dickson, "Soldier Ask Not"
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2024
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