Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. -- Alfred North Whitehead (Introduction to Mathematics)

Pay attention to opportunity cost at all times. Doing one thing means not doing other things. This is a form of risk that is very easy to ignore, to your detriment. -- Marc Andreessen (http://blog.pmarca.com/)

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

L’art qui satisfait le besoin le plus impérieux sera toujours le plus honoré. -- Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs.

I think it is wise, and only honest, to warn you that my goal is immodest. It is not my purpose to "transfer knowledge" to you that, subsequently, you can forget again. My purpose is no less than to effectuate in each of you a noticeable, irreversable change. I want you to gain, for the rest of your lives, the insight that beautiful proofs are not "found" by trial anf error but are the result of a consciously applied design discipline. I want you to raise your quality standards. I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me. -- E. W. Dijkstra

Only bad designers blame their failings on the users. -- unknown

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. ~Anonymous

It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. ~Steve Jobs

If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got. ~Anonymous