While I’ve always appreciated beautiful code, I share Jonathan’s concern about studying it too much. I think studying beauty in music and painting has led us to modern classical music and painting that the majority of us just don’t get. Beauty can be seen when it emerges, but isn’t something to strive for in isolation of a larger context. In the software world, the larger context would be the utility of the software to the end user. -- [A comment on a blog]

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are always cocksure and the intelligent are always filled with doubt. -- Bertrand Russell

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. -- Galileo Galilei

The lesson of the story might appear to be that self-interested and ambitious people in power are often the cause of wastefulness in developing countries. But self-interested and ambitious people are in positions of power, great and small, all over the world. In many places, they are restrained by the law, the press, and democratic opposition. Cameroon's tragedy is that there is nothing to hold self-interest in check. -- Tim Harford

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. -- Arthur C. Clarke

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well. ~Diane Ackerman

I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear. –Rosa Parks

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. –Robert Frost

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. –Anne Frank