a. W. : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English)	by Linux fortune

Gauls! We have nothing to fear; except perhaps that the sky may fall on our heads tomorrow. But as we all know, tomorrow never comes!! -- Adventures of Asterix
I remember once being on a station platform in Cleveland at four in the morning. A black porter was carrying my bags, and as we were waiting for the train to come in, he said to me: "Excuse me, Mr. Cooke, I don't want to invade your privacy, but I have a bet with a friend of mine. Who composed the opening theme music of 'Omnibus'? My friend said Virgil Thomson." I asked him, "What do you say?" He replied, "I say Aaron Copeland." I said, "You're right." The porter said, "I knew Thomson doesn't write counterpoint that way." I told that to a network president, and he was deeply unimpressed. -- Alistair Cooke
Jane and I got mixed up with a television show -- or as we call it back east here: TV -- a clever contraction derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. However, it is our latest medium -- we call it a medium because nothing's well done. It was discovered, I suppose you've heard, by a man named Fulton Berle, and it has already revolutionized social grace by cutting down parlour conversation to two sentences: "What's on television?" and "Good night". -- Goodman Ace, letter to Groucho Marx, in The Groucho Letters, 1967
As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error. -- Weisert
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -- Maurice Wilkes, designer of EDSAC, on programming, 1949
Civilization, as we know it, will end sometime this evening. See SYSNOTE tomorrow for more information.
Happiness adds and multiplies as we divide it with others.
On Krat's main screen appeared the holo image of a man, and several dolphins. From the man's shape, Krat could tell it was a female, probably their leader. "...stupid creatures unworthy of the name `sophonts.' Foolish, pre-sentient upspring of errant masters. We slip away from all your armed might, laughing at your clumsiness! We slip away as we always will, you pathetic creatures. And now that we have a real head start, you'll never catch us! What better proof that the Progenitors favor not you, but us! What better proof..." The taunt went on. Krat listened, enraged, yet at the same time savoring the artistry of it. These men are better than I'd thought. Their insults are wordy and overblown, but they have talent. They deserve honorable, slow deaths. - David Brin, Startide Rising
As long as we're going to reinvent the wheel again, we might as well try making it round this time. - Mike Dennison
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell
"Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is to a cockatoo." -- George Bernard Shaw
History is on our side (as long as we can control the historians).
It has long been known that birds will occasionally build nests in the manes of horses. The only known solution to this problem is to sprinkle baker's yeast in the mane, for, as we all know, yeast is yeast and nest is nest, and never the mane shall tweet.
FORTUNE'S GUIDE TO DEALING WITH REAL-LIFE SCIENCE FICTION: #2 What to do... if you get a phone call from Mars: Speak slowly and be sure to enunciate your words properly. Limit your vocabulary to simple words. Try to determine if you are speaking to someone in a leadership capacity, or an ordinary citizen. if he, she or it doesn't speak English? Hang up. There's no sense in trying to learn Martian over the phone. If your Martian really had something important to say to you, he, she or it would have taken the trouble to learn the language before calling. if you get a phone call from Jupiter? Explain to your caller, politely but firmly, that being from Jupiter, he, she or it is not "life as we know it". Try to terminate the conversation as soon as possible. It will not profit you, and the charges may have been reversed.
Proof techniques #1: Proof by Induction. This technique is used on equations with "_n" in them. Induction techniques are very popular, even the military used them. SAMPLE: Proof of induction without proof of induction. We know it's true for _n equal to 1. Now assume that it's true for every natural number less than _n. _N is arbitrary, so we can take _n as large as we want. If _n is sufficiently large, the case of _n+1 is trivially equivalent, so the only important _n are _n less than _n. We can take _n = _n (from above), so it's true for _n+1 because it's just about _n. QED. (QED translates from the Latin as "So what?")
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed from available data. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition seven times seven (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or fifty times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that. With these data we can compute the temperature of Heaven. The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute temperature of the earth (~300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed, but it must be less than 444.6C, the temperature at which brimstone or sulphur changes from a liquid to a gas. Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, or 444.6C (Above this point it would be a vapor, not a lake.) We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C. -- "Applied Optics", vol. 11, A14, 1972
And as we stand on the edge of darkness Let our chant fill the void That others may know In the land of the night The ship of the sun Is drawn by The grateful dead. -- Tibetan "Book of the Dead," ca. 4000 BC.
Hier liegt ein Mann ganz obnegleich; Im Leibe dick, an Suden reich. Wir haben ihn in das Grab gesteckt, Here lies a man with sundry flaws Weil es uns dunkt er sei verreckt. And numerous Sins upon his head; We buried him today because As far as we can tell, he's dead. -- PDQ Bach's epitaph, as requested by his cousin Betty Sue Bach and written by the local doggeral catcher; "The Definitive Biography of PDQ Bach", Peter Schickele
How doth the VAX's C-compiler Improve its object code. And even as we speak does it Increase the system load. How patiently it seems to run And spit out error flags, While users, with frustration, all Tear their clothes to rags.
Knock Knock... (who's there?) Ether! (ether who?) Ether Bunny... Yea! [chorus] Yeay! Stay on the Happy side, always on the happy side, Stay on the Happy side of life! Bum bum bum bum bum bum You will feel no pain, as we drive you insane, So Stay on the Happy Side of life! Knock Knock... (who's there?) Anna! (anna who?) An another ether bunny... [chorus] Knock Knock... (who's there?) Stilla! (stilla who?) Still another ether bunny... [chorus] Knock Knock... (who's there?) Yetta! (yetta who?) Yet another ether bunny... [chorus] Knock Knock... (who's there?) Cargo! (cargo who?) Cargo beep beep and run over ether bunny... [chorus] Knock Knock... (who's there?) Boo! (boo who?) Don't Cry! Ether bunny be back next year! [chorus]
"So here's a picture of reality: (picture of circle with lots of sqiggles in it) As we all know, reality is a mess." -- Larry Wall (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)
Humorix's Vast Spy Network(tm) has discovered that the White House website is only 124 clicks away from an illegal, pirated copy of the upcoming movie, "Star Trek XXIII: The Search For Merchandising Opportunities". Clearly, the President's webmaster is violating the DMCA, and we urge that this injustice be dealt with, just as soon as we finish downloading a copy.
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is to a cockatoo. -- George Bernard Shaw
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist. -- T.S. Eliot, essay on Baudelaire
The worst is not so long as we can say "This is the worst." -- King Lear
We are stronger than our skin of flesh and metal, for we carry and share a spectrum of suns and lands that lends us legends as we craft our immortality and interweave our destinies of water and air, leaving shadows that gather color of their own, until they outshine the substance that cast them.
MEMORIES OF MY FAMILY MEETINGS still are a source of strength to me. I remember we'd all get into the car -- I forget what kind it was -- and drive and drive. I'm not sure where we'd go, but I think there were some bees there. The smell of something was strong in the air as we played whatever sport we played. I remember a bigger, older guy whom we called "Dad." We'd eat some stuff or not and then I think we went home. I guess some things never leave you. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
Since this database is not used for profit, and since entire works are not published, it falls under fair use, as we understand it. However, if any half-assed idiot decides to make a profit off of this, they will need to double check it all... -- Notes included with the default fortunes database
* gxam wonders if all these globals are really necessary <Knghtbrd> most of them at the moment yes <Knghtbrd> we REALLY need to clean them up at some point <Knghtbrd> gxam: the globals will have to go away as we migrate towards modularity and madness (ie, libtool)
Fortune's Real-Life Courtroom Quote #29: THE JUDGE: Now, as we begin, I must ask you to banish all present information and prejudice from your minds, if you have any ...
Double sigh. _04 is going onto thousands of CDs even as we speak, so to speak. -- Larry Wall in <199710221718.KAA24299@wall.org>
Always there remain portions of our heart into which no one is able to enter, invite them as we may.