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)

So - what are the most important problems in software engineering? I’d answer “dealing with complexity”. -- Mark Chu-Carroll

Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all. A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side. A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows. That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and "great thinking". It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice. -- Steven Den Beste

Give up control. You never really had it anyway. -- How to fail: 25 secrets learned through failure

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

We now come to the decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget about what the symbols stand for. ...[The mathematician] need not be idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for. -- Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking

If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you! ~T. Harv Eker

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. –Chinese Proverb

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. –Chinese Proverb

Dream big and dare to fail. –Norman Vaughan