Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -- Mark Twain

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)

Always dive down into a problem and get your hands on the deepest issue behind the problem. All other considerations are to dismissed as "engineering details"; they can be sorted out after the basic problem has been solved. -- Chris Crawford

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

Getting back to failing early, I've learned it's important to completely fail. Get fired. Shoot the project, then burn its corpse. Melt the CVS repository and microwave the backup CDs. When things go wrong, I've often tried to play the hero from start to finish. Guess what? Some projects are doomed no matter what. Some need skills I don't possess. And some need a fresh face. -- Reginald Braithwaite

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great. ~John D. Rockefeller

It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. –Ann Landers

The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. –Chinese Proverb

Success is...knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others. ~ John C. Maxwell