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)

J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de l'indifférence. -- Anatole France

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

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer. -- Bill Gates

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. -- Brian Kernigan

Philosophy: the finding of bad reasons for what one believes by instinct. -- Brave New World (paraphrased)

Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. –Teddy Roosevelt

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. –Michael Jordan

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

15.Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. –Charles Swindoll