Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. -- Alfred North Whitehead (Introduction to Mathematics)

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder. -- Erik Naggum

I'm always happy to trade performance for readability as long as the former isn't already scarce. -- Crayz (Commentor on blog.raganwald.com)

I think that a lot of programmers are ignoring an important point when people talk about reducing code repetition on large projects. Part of the idea is that large projects are intrinsically *wrong*. That you should be looking at making a number of smaller projects that are composable, even if you never end up reusing one of those smaller projects elsewhere. -- Dan Nugent

A guideline in the process of stepwise refinement should be the principle to decompose decisions as much as possible, to untangle aspects which are only seemingly interdependent, and to defer those decisions which concern details of representation as long as possible. -- Niklaus Wirth

So - what are the most important problems in software engineering? I’d answer “dealing with complexity”. -- Mark Chu-Carroll

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown

There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed. ~Ray Goforth

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

You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them. ~Michael Jordan