A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer. -- Bill Gates

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)

Acknowledging the negative doesn't mean sniveling [whining, complaining]; it means facing the truth and then moving on. -- George Leonard, Mastery.

Chance favors the prepared mind. -- Louis Pasteur

Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. -- Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

While I’ve always appreciated beautiful code, I share Jonathan’s concern about studying it too much. I think studying beauty in music and painting has led us to modern classical music and painting that the majority of us just don’t get. Beauty can be seen when it emerges, but isn’t something to strive for in isolation of a larger context. In the software world, the larger context would be the utility of the software to the end user. -- [A comment on a blog]

Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to doDon’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. ~Jim Rohn

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

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. ~Maya Angelou

No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.~ Anonymous