I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste." -- Paul Graham

Resume writing is just like dating, or applying for a bank loan, in that nobody wants you if you're desperate. -- Steve Yegge.

The general principle for complexity design is this: Think locally, act locally. -- Richard P. Gabriel & Ron Goldman, Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code

It is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. -- Edsger Dijkstra

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)

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

No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.~ Anonymous

You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you had to overcome to reach your goals. ~Booker T. Washington

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. –Amelia Earhart

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. –Steve Jobs