codehappy quotes

A well-known friend is a treasure.

What we Are is God's gift to us.
What we Become is our gift to God.

A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention,
and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
-- Ursula K. LeGuin

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted
armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
-- Ernest Hemingway

"...A strange enigma is man!"
"Someone calls him a soul concealed in an animal," I suggested.
"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarked
that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he
becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what
any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number
will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says
the statistician."
-- Sherlock Holmes, "The Sign of Four"

What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing
to compare it with.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep
him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are
worth committing.
-- Samuel Butler

"Well," Brahma said, "even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no
wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred."
-- The Mahabharata.

A sadist is a masochist who follows the Golden Rule.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single
man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Do you suffer painful elimination?
-- Don Knuth, "Structured Programming with Gotos"

Do you suffer painful recrimination?
-- Nancy Boxer, "Structured Programming with Come-froms"

Do you suffer painful illumination?
-- Isaac Newton, "Optics"

Do you suffer painful hallucination?
-- Don Juan, cited by Carlos Casteneda

A real person has two reasons for doing anything ... a good reason and
the real reason.

Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines
of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them...
Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced
only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen. In it his mind floated freely,
able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed,
undistracted by any outside disturbances. Logical structures no longer
inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished.
All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important,
became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships
not evident to ordinary vision. Like beads strung on a string of their own
meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by
all. Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming
all others. And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem,
destroying Subject-Object by becoming them.
Time passed, unheeded.
Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and
Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes.
-- Wayfarer

A real friend isn't someone you use once and then throw away.
A real friend is someone you can use over and over again.

"We're not talking about the same thing," he said. "For you the world is
weird because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it. For me
the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious,
unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must accept
responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous
desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must
learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a
short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it."
-- Don Juan

Now is the time for drinking; now the time to beat the earth with
unfettered foot.
-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)

FRENCH MAYOR BANS RESIDENTS FROM DYING
France (Reuters) - The mayor of a French Mediterranean town, faced with a cemetery "full to bursting," has banned local residents from dying until he can find somewhere else to bury them. Gil Bernardi, mayor of Le Lavandou on the coast 15 miles west of Saint Tropez, introduced the ban after a court rejected his plans to build a cemetery in a tranquil setting by the sea. Bernardi said most locals had obeyed the edict so far, but he was desperately trying to find a resting place for a homeless man who had recently passed away in the town. "Initially, the decree has been remarkably well followed," the mayor said. Bernardi has appealed against the ruling preventing the seaside cemetery being built, saying it would be the best final resting place for his townsfolk. "What people want here, because it's a local tradition, is their own little personal plot of land, their burial spot, not an impersonal pigeonhole," he said.

We're mortal -- which is to say, we're ignorant, stupid, and sinful --
but those are only handicaps. Our pride is that nevertheless, now and
then, we do our best. A few times we succeed. What more dare we ask for?
-- Ensign Flandry

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a "realist," he
is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing.
-- Sydney Harris