I use fortune and cowsay1 to spit out pithy sayings when I launch my terminal2. This morning’s seemed very apropos.

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

– Mark Twain

After the game the king and the pawn go in the same box.

– Italian proverb

The universe speaks.

And now, a little movie3 to demonstrate. Pay no attention to the locomotive.

  1. Mac users can use brew to install the fortune and cowsay programs. Arch users can combine both with cowfortune in the AUR. And for extra fun, install lolcat and get rainbow fortune cookies. I’ve posted the fish shell code I use in the comments below (the footnote formatting mangles code blocks). ↩︎

  2. From xkcd #196: Command Line Fu Thank you, Randall! ↩︎

  3. This movie brought to you by asciinema. Install on macOS with the command brew install asciinema. ↩︎