Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word. -- Nassim Taleb

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)

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. -- Bertrand Russell

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger Dijkstra

Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means. -- Dr. Koichi Kawana

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out. ~Robert Collier

It is never too late to be what you might have been. –George Eliot

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. –Plato

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. –Mark Twain