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  fortune index  all fortunes 
  
 |  |  | #6434 |  | Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear.  Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely
 a loose misapplication of the word.  Consider the flea!--incomparably the
 bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.
 Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact
 that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth
 to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the
 very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more
 afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by
 an earthquake ten centuries before.  When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam
 as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and
 put him at the head of the procession.
 -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
 
 |  |  |  | #6435 |  | Delay not, Caesar.  Read it instantly. -- Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar" 3,1
 
 Here is a letter, read it at your leisure.
 -- Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice" 5,1
 
 [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when
 referring to I/O system services.]
 
 |  |  |  | #6436 |  | Delores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping along smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious
 to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, and due to an
 overdose of flouride as a child which caused her to suffer from chronic
 apathy, doomed herself to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless
 as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred pound barbell in a
 steroid-free fitness center.
 -- Winning sentence, 1990 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
 
 |  |  |  | #6437 |  | Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.  The world owes you nothing.  It was here first.
 -- Mark Twain
 
 |  |  |  | #6438 |  | "Elves and Dragons!" I says to him.  "Cabbages and potatoes are better for you and me."
 -- J. R. R. Tolkien
 
 |  |  |  | #6439 |  | English literature's performing flea. -- Sean O'Casey on P.G. Wodehouse
 
 |  |  |  | #6440 |  | Even the clearest and most perfect circumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution.  Take
 the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman; if you have witnesses, you will
 find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil,
 you will say that she did it with her teeth.
 -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
 
 |  |  |  | #6441 |  | Every cloud engenders not a storm. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
 
 |  |  |  | #6442 |  | Every why hath a wherefore. -- William Shakespeare, "A Comedy of Errors"
 
 |  |  |  | #6443 |  | Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly. -- William Shakespeare, "The Rape of Lucrece"
 
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