To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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]

Fools! Don't they know that tears are a woman's most effective weapon? -- Catwoman (The Batman TV Series, episode 83)

Let me try to get this straight: Lisp is a language for describing algorithms. This was JohnMcCarthy's original purpose, anyway: to build something more convenient than a Turing machine. Lisp is not about file, socket or GUI programming - Lisp is about expressive power. (For example, you can design multiple object systems for Lisp, in Lisp. Or implement the now-fashionable AOP. Or do arbitrary transformations on parsed source code.) If you don't value expressive power, Lisp ain't for you. I, personally, would prefer Lisp to not become mainstream: this would necessarily involve a dumbing down. -- VladimirSlepnev

Functional programming is like describing your problem to a mathematician. Imperative programming is like giving instructions to an idiot. -- arcus, #scheme on Freenode

Do you want to sell sugared water all your life or do you want to change the world? -- Steve Jobs, to John Sculley (former Pepsi executive)

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. ~Francis Chan

Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right. –Henry Ford

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success. ~Bruce Feirstein