WARNING: GIANT POST AHEAD (what can I say I love quotations)
ABRACADABRA by Jamrach Holobom (I'm not sure if he's a real person; the poem appears originally in Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary as far as I'm aware)
Spoiler:
By Abracadabra we signify
An infinite number of things.
'Tis the answer to What? and How? and Why?
And Whence? and Whither?--a word whereby
The Truth (with the comfort it brings)
Is open to all who grope in night,
Crying for Wisdom's holy light.
Whether the word is a verb or a noun
Is knowledge beyond my reach.
I only know that 'tis handed down.
From sage to sage,
From age to age--
An immortal part of speech!
Of an ancient man the tale is told
That he lived to be ten centuries old,
In a cave on a mountain side.
(True, he finally died.)
The fame of his wisdom filled the land,
For his head was bald, and you'll understand
His beard was long and white
And his eyes uncommonly bright.
Philosophers gathered from far and near
To sit at his feet and hear and hear,
Though he never was heard
To utter a word
But "Abracadabra, abracadab,
Abracada, abracad,
Abraca, abrac, abra, ab!"
'Twas all he had,
'Twas all they wanted to hear, and each
Made copious notes of the mystical speech,
Which they published next--
A trickle of text
In the meadow of commentary.
Mighty big books were these,
In a number, as leaves of trees;
In learning, remarkably--very!
He's dead,
As I said,
And the books of the sages have perished,
But his wisdom is sacredly cherished.
In Abracadabra it solemnly rings,
Like an ancient bell that forever swings.
O, I love to hear
That word make clear
Humanity's General Sense of Things.
Yes, I know it's a full poem; don't read it if you don't like it.
Here's another poem, short so you don't crucify me:
"Morality"
'One ought always to be clean',
said the cat on the sand-patch
While on the needy deed it did
It scratched a little neat pile of sand
- Lauri Viita, Finnish cynical poet (fairly literal, but still a bad translation)
Here's some more serene stuff:
"Serendipity prayer"
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.
- dunno who made it
Now for the less serene again:
"Let's see, said Mengele" - my own coinage; in Finland we say
"Let's see, said the doctor" when we start to think of a solution to a problem
"Sit while you're young and you'll have strength to stand at old age."
- Finnish saying. Most of my country's sayings are like this...
"When the tree falls, the monkeys scatter."
"I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand."
"A bird does not sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song." (for all the furrow-browed rationalists in this place )
"A day of sorrow is longer than a month of joy."
- Chinese sayings
Continuing with the country theme:
"The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones"
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
"When smashing monuments, save the pedestals. They always come in handy."
"We know we are on the wrong track, but we are compensating for this shortcoming by accelerating."
"Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?"
- all by Stanislaw Jerzy Lec... Poles are even more cynical than us Finns, to the luck of all the quotationary books of the world.
Now for a few stiff upper lips:
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours." - Charles Napier, British commander, referring to the Sati-ritual in then British India (where women were burned alive on their husband's funeral pyres).
- Good God dear Sir; it appears I have lost my leg!
- By God, my good man, so it seems. - This is supposedly an exchange between the Duke of Wellington and one of his lieutenants at the battle of Waterloo. I read it in Finnish so the translation may not be exact. I think it captures well the essence of Englishness - if I can be the judge of that, being Finnish myself.
Some dry wit from men in wet business:
"I didn't want to hurt them, I only wanted to kill them." - David Berkowitz (Serial Killer)
"I'm sorry I killed five people, okay?" – Gary Alan Walker (Serial killer)
"Even psychopaths have emotions. Then again, maybe not." -Richard Ramirez (Serial killer)
"I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me, and I believe the only way to reform people is to kill 'em. My motto is: Rob 'em all, rape 'em all, and kill 'em all." - Carl Panzram (Serial killer)
"A clown can get away with murder." - John Wayne Gacy Jr. (Serial killer)
"Look down on me, you will see a fool. Look up at me, you will see your Lord. Look straight at me, you will see yourself." – Charles Manson (very creepy, very anti-christlike; I can see why he had such appeal among the young and the clueless)
"To choose ones victims, to prepare ones plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed - there is nothing sweeter in the world." -Joseph Stalin (I guess it would be more funny if uncle Joe didn't find it quite so sweet... )
"Killing is killing whether done for duty, profit, or fun" –Richard Ramirez (Serial killer) (coming from a man who stabbed his numerous victims, it seems even more poignant)
"LOVE THEE THY FAMILY" - written in blood on his apartment wall by a Finnish man who had just murdered his entire family. Yes, what a ****ed up country... Not sure if it was his own or his family's blood; the latter would make it far more poetic.
Miscellaneous:
"Psychology is the science about psychologists." - some fellow
"Do not approach a bull from the front, a donkey from behind or an idiot from any direction." - someone
"Blood is thicker than water but not as thick as money" - Bob Dylan said this on his radio show, but it's probably from somewhere else originally
"It rains on the just as well as the wicked man - more on the just man though since the wicked man done and stole his umbrella!" - someone
"Once I had no shoes and was rather unhappy; then I met a man without legs and
took his shoes for myself." -an Indian saying (supposedly)
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for something." -An African saying
"The road has no shadow." - likewise an African saying. I really like this one, as I would roam around the world if only I had the money.
"It is easy to bear the misfortunes of others." - Rabelais (I think)
"Admiration begins where understanding ends." - Charles Baudelaire (it cuts both ways; I really like it)
"Here lies Lester Moore
four slugs from a forty-four;
no less, no more" - a gravestone in Fallout 2
A poem again (sue me):
"A Beautiful Morning"
I woke early one morning,
The earth lay cool and still
When suddenly a tiny bird
Perched on my window sill,
He sang a song so lovely
So carefree and so gay,
That slowly all my troubles
Began to slip away.
He sang of far off places
Of laughter and of fun,
It seemed his very trilling,
Brought up the morning sun.
I stirred beneath the covers
Crept slowly out of bed,
Then gently shut the window
And crushed his little head.
(I'm not a morning person.) - some witty individual. I believe all who are grumpy in the morning like me and the writer will be cheered up by this poem.
Right, that concludes the show for tonight... Oh no, not quite:
Kaiser William II of Germany told a young Queen Wilhelmina of Netherlands that: "My guards are seven feet tall and yours are only shoulder-high to them".
Wilhelmina smiled politely and replied: "Quite true, Your Majesty, your guards are seven feet tall. But when we open our dikes, the water is ten feet deep!
"I've always wanted to improve and expand on the good name of my weapon by doing good things."
- Mikhail Kalashnikov
"The more time passes, the more I am sorry about it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog."
- Oleg Gazenko, on Laika and Sputnik 2
"We may not have got everything right, but at least we knew when the century was going to end."
- Douglas Adams, on Apple Computers and Y2K
"I've been laying bodies for twenty years... When it came to my own brother I could barely look at him."
- Bernard Scripps
"I believe people would be alive today if there was a death penalty."
- Nancy Reagan
The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.
Brooks Atkinson (1894 - 1984), Once Around the Sun, 1951
Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.
Charles Peters
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
Eugene McCarthy (1916 - 2005), Time magazine, Feb. 12, 1979
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
Woody Allen (1935 - )
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
Douglas Adams
Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.
Douglas Adams
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Douglas Adams
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001), "Mostly Harmless"
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