To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. -- author unknown (quoted in `Robust Systems', Gerald Jay Suseman)

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)

He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. -- Matthew 5:45

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. -- Hans Hofmann

Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all. A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side. A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows. That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and "great thinking". It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice. -- Steven Den Beste

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. -- Alan Kay

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. –John Lennon

What’s the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable. ~Anonymous

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

If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. –Vincent Van Gogh