You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve. -- Pablo Picasso

The hardest part of design ... is keeping features out. -- Donald Norman

Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. -- Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS. -- Alan Kay

What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights us is so great! ... When we win it's with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. ... Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings. -- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Man Watching.

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection. -- Butler Lampson

The number one reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors. ~Napoleon Hill

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. ~Swami Vivekananda

The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself--the invisible battles inside all of us--that's where it's at. –Jesse Owens

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