Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. -- Thomas Edison

You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. -- Dr. Seuss

The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders. -- Ralph Nader

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)

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection. -- Butler Lampson

Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it ain't fun -- it's entertainment. -- David Mamet (as relayed by Joss Whedon)

Dream big and dare to fail. –Norman Vaughan

Do one thing every day that scares you. ~Anonymous

First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end. –Aristotle

You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing, no one to blame. –Erica Jong