Why teach drawing to accountants? Because drawing class doesn't just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be more observant. There's no company on earth that wouldn't benefit from having people become more observant. -- Randy S. Nelson (dean of Pixar University)

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. (I have made this letter so long only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.) -- Blaise Pascal (Lettres Provinciales)

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

The best way to learn to live with our limitations is to know them. --E. W. Dijkstra, The humble programmer

A person won't retain proficiency at a task unless he or she has at one time learned to perform that task very rapidly. Learning research demonstrates that the skills of people who become accurate but not fast deteriorate much sooner than the skills of people who become both accurate and fast. -- Philip Greenspun

Opportunities that present themselves to you are the consequence -- at least partially -- of being in the right place at the right time. They tend to present themselves when you're not expecting it -- and often when you are engaged in other activities that would seem to preclude you from pursuing them. And they come and go quickly -- if you don't jump all over an opportunity, someone else generally will and it will vanish. -- Marc Andreessen (http://blog.pmarca.com/)

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown

Change your thoughts and you change your world. –Norman Vincent Peale

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

The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself--the invisible battles inside all of us--that's where it's at. –Jesse Owens