No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it. -- Alberti

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. -- Frederick P. Brooks, No Sliver Bullet.

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. -- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. -- Official definition of "duck typing"

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that–lacking zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs. -- Robert Firth

Actually, the essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes. -- George Leonard, Mastery.

Fortune sides with him who dares. ~Virgil

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. –Martin Luther King Jr.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. –Pablo Picasso

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. ~Thomas Jefferson