[brunoff]

  $ cowsay "hey dude"
   __________
  < hey dude >
   ----------
          \   ^__^
           \  (oo)\_______
              (__)\       )\/\
                  ||----w |
                  ||     ||

[tomcatfish]

In your .bashrc (or whatever config file is run whenever you open up a new terminal).

fortune | cowsay

And voilà, you have a little quote running in your cow friend whenever you open up your terminal.

Also: Does anyone have any more good fortune files? I only have the fortunes that came preinstalled on Ubuntu but would love to have more.

[kmstout]

I like cowsay (especially cowsay -f dragon) for punching up important git commit messages.