However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -- Winston Churchill

Humans aren't rational -- they rationalize. And I don't just mean "some of them" or "other people". I'm talking about everyone. We have a "logic engine" in our brains, but for the most part, it's not the one in the driver's seat -- instead it operates after the fact, generating rationalizations and excuses for our behavior. -- Paul Buchheit

Well then. How could you possibly live without automated refactoring tools? How else could you coordinate the caterpillar-like motions of all Java’s identical tiny legs, its thousands of similar parts? I’ll tell you how: Ruby is a butterfly. -- Stevey, Refactoring Trilogy, Part 1.

That is one of the most distinctive differences between school and the real world: there is no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the whole concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to encourage kids. It is not found in nature. -- Paul Graham

Normality is the route to nowhere. -- Ridderstrale & Nordstorm, Funky Business

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)

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. ~Maya Angelou

Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. ~Winston Churchill

Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. ~Anonymous

Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to doDon’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. ~Jim Rohn