Philosophy: the finding of bad reasons for what one believes by instinct. -- Brave New World (paraphrased)

Pay attention to opportunity cost at all times. Doing one thing means not doing other things. This is a form of risk that is very easy to ignore, to your detriment. -- Marc Andreessen (http://blog.pmarca.com/)

Attitude is no substitute for competence. -- Eric S. Raymond, How to become a hacker

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. -- William Strunk, Jr. (The Elements of Style)

In general, we can think of data as defined by some collection of selectors and constructors, together with specified conditions that these procedures must fulfill in order to be a valid representation. -- SICP, What is meant by data?

And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. -- Joel Spolsky

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success. ~Bruce Feirstein

If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you! ~T. Harv Eker

Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. –Joshua J. Marine

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work. ~Thomas J. Watson