A hacker on a roll may be able to produce–in a period of a few months–something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more. -- Peter Seebach

An expert is, according to my working definition "someone who doesn't need to look up answers to easy questions". -- Eric Lippert.

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)

Omit needless words. -- William Strunk, Jr. (The Elements of Style)

In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is. -- Albert Einstein

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. -- Galileo Galilei

Fall seven times and stand up eight. –Japanese Proverb

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. ~Pablo Picasso

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How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. –Anne Frank