No problem should ever have to be solved twice. -- Eric S. Raymond, How to become a hacker

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. -- Thomas Edison

It is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. -- Edsger Dijkstra

What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will. -- Paul Graham

The general principle for complexity design is this: Think locally, act locally. -- Richard P. Gabriel & Ron Goldman, Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code

L’art qui satisfait le besoin le plus impérieux sera toujours le plus honoré. -- Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. ~Albert Einstein

Whenever you see a successful person you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them. ~Vaibhav Shah

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all. ~Dale Carnegie