There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies
and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no
obvious deficiencies.
-- C. A. R. Hoare
I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and
not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design
and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either
fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied
them together, or tried. That's why programming -- or buying software
-- on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided
effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or
carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in
APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.
-- Ted Nelson
You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write,
even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
-- Alan J. Perlis
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it
wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had
to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized
that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in
finding mistakes in my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to
students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential
programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Even though it is almost always better for computer scientists to
start counting at 0, the rest of the world will probably never change
to 0-origin indexing. Even Edsger Dijkstra counts "1-2-3-4 | 1-2-3-4"
when he plays the piano!
-- Donald Knuth
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to
choose from.
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Hofstadter's Law: Any computer project will take twice as long as you
think it will even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
-- Douglas Hofstadter
Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy programmers.
-- Robert Hummel
All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
-- unknown
To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so.
-- Orben's Current Comedy
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
-- Farmers' Almanac, 1978
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the
only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
-- Wernher von Braun
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through
the complex domain.
-- Jacques Hadamard
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies
it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is
beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth
knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth
living.
-- Jules-Henri Poincaré
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own
reasons for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he
contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous
structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend a little
of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
-- Albert Einstein
I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this
or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to
know His thoughts; the rest are details.
-- Albert Einstein
I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem
to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting
myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell
than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me.
-- Isaac Newton
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."
-- Isaac Asimov
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Wernher von Braun
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what
nobody has thought.
-- Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
-- Arthur Koestler
Einstein didn't go around wracking his brain, muttering to himself,
"How, oh how, can I come up with a Great Idea?" [...]
The bottom line is that invention is much more like falling off a log
than like sawing one in two. Despite Thomas Alva Edison's memorable
remark, "Genius is 2 percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration,"
we're not all going to become geniuses simply by sweating more or
resolving to try harder. A mind follows its path of least
resistance, and it's when it feels easiest that it is most likely
being its most creative. Or, as Mozart used to say, things should
"flow like oil" -- and Mozart ought to know! Trying harder is not the
name of the game; the trick is getting the right concept to begin
with, so that making variations on it is like taking candy from a
baby.
-- Douglas R. Hofstadter
The secret of genius is knowing how to hide your sources.
-- Albert Einstein
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
-- Albert Einstein
Intelligence is the ability to perceive patterns. Genius is the
ability to perceive patterns where the bulk of mankind cannot.
Scholarship is the ability to perceive patterns where there aren't
any.
-- Michael J. Moran
Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks, but an
accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a
house.
-- Jules-Henri Poincaré
If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement
is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful
your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, [or]
who made the guess... if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.
That is all there is to it.
-- Richard P. Feynman
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
-- Richard P. Feynman
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and
express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you
cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and
unsatisfactory kind ...
-- Lord Kelvin
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the
particular and the eternal in the transitory.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
Science is the topography of ignorance.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record
of dead religions.
-- Oscar Wilde
Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a
proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse
to withhold one's provisional assent.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
We all agree that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us
is whether it is crazy enough.
-- Niels Bohr to Wolfgang Pauli
Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress,
but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the
enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed,
would almost surely not grow this twig again.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
What mutation instigates,
Recombination escalates.
What selection confiscates,
Isolation speciates.
-- P. Gastonguay
Not only does one not retain all at once the truly rare works, but
even within such works it is the least precious parts that one
perceives first. Less deceptive than life, these great masterpieces do
not give us their best at the beginning.
-- Marcel Proust
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.
Imagination encircles the world.
-- Albert Einstein
All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
-- Federico Fellini
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
-- Pablo Picasso
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the
proportion.
-- Francis Bacon
Beauty and music seduce us first; later, ashamed of our own
sensuality, we insist on meaning.
-- Clive Barker
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
-- Plutarch
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural
curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
-- Anatole France
Education does not consist merely in adorning the memory and
enlightening the understanding. Its main business should be to direct
the will.
-- Joseph Joubert
One should guard against preaching to young people success in the
customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for
work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its
result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.
-- Albert Einstein
A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and
excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed
vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is
dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence
with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of
all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be
a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout
life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments
of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are
artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
-- Rachel Carson
May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you
succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into
understanding, and understanding into wisdom.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra,
concluding a
graduation speech.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-- Thomas Stearns Eliot, Four
Quartets
Know thyself.
-- Oracle of Delphi
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
-- Mark Twain
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson
None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not
freedom, but license.
-- John Milton
The superior man does not set his mind either for anything, or against
anything; what is right he will follow.
-- Confucious
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the
joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of
comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics
built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.
-- Albert Einstein
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
1:3
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act
rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those
because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
-- Aristotle
Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our
age.
-- Albert Einstein
Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.
-- Albert Einstein
Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and
ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and
fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations
and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to
me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in
the social life of man.
-- Albert Einstein
Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
-- Abraham Lincoln
The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our
dispositions and not our circumstances.
-- Martha Washington
Happiness for a bee or a dolphin is simply to exist: for a man it is
to know and to wonder.
-- Jaques-Yves Cousteau
All we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic
about.
-- Albert Einstein
Don't aim at success -- the more you aim at it and make it a target,
the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot
be pursued; it must ensue... as the unintended side-effect of one's
personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
-- Viktor Frankl
Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed
cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no
object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness
to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.
-- George Bernard Shaw
In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow.
-- Ecclesiastes 1:18
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will
not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius
will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not;
the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination
are alone omnipotent. The slogan "Press On" has solved and always will
solve the problems of the human race.
-- Calvin Coolidge
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them
better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives
valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is
not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually
strives to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great
devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows
in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he
fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall
never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor
defeat.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of
enthusiasm.
-- Winston Churchill
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Be always displeased at what thou art, if thou desire to attain to
what thou art not; for where thou hast pleased thyself, there thou
abidest.
-- Francis Quarles
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long
and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones
which open for us.
-- Alexander Graham Bell
Be like a bird, that halting in her flight alights
Awhile on boughs too slight.
Feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings,
Knowing that she hath wings.
-- Victor Hugo
To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of
education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To
accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is
complete.
-- Epictetus
The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it, but what
he becomes by it.
-- John Ruskin
When you learn to let go of problems instead of resisting with all
your might, your life will begin to flow. Change the things that can
be changed, accept those that cannot, and have the wisdom to know the
difference.
-- Zen Buddhist text
The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his
work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body,
his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly
knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in
whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or
playing. To him he is always doing both.
-- Zen Buddhist text
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as
it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the
finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing
and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of
our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may
forget altogether to live them.
-- Alan Watts
Great minds are like eagles, and build their nest in some lofty
solitude.
-- Arthur Schopenauer
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy
in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the
midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of
solitude.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who is wise? He who learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He who
governs his passions. Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that?
Nobody.
-- Benjamin Franklin
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
-- Bertrand Russell
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is
those who know little, and not those who know much, who positively
assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
-- Charles Darwin
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the
opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr
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