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

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. -- Aristotle.

He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. -- Matthew 5:45

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/)

To follow the path: look to the master, follow the master, walk with the master, see through the master, become the master. -- Modern zen Poem

An interpreter raises the machine to the level of the user program; a compiler lowers the user program to the level of the machine language. -- SICP

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work. ~Thomas J. Watson

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. ~Thomas Jefferson

Opportunities don’t happen, you create them. ~Chris Grosser

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. –Plato