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/)

Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. -- Donald Knuth

The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability. -- Randall E. Stross

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline. -- Bill Clinton

A guideline in the process of stepwise refinement should be the principle to decompose decisions as much as possible, to untangle aspects which are only seemingly interdependent, and to defer those decisions which concern details of representation as long as possible. -- Niklaus Wirth

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]

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. ~Jim Ryun

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse. –Florence Nightingale

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success. ~Dale Carnegie

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