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)

Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. -- Eric S. Raymond, How To Be A Hacker

Premature abstraction is an equally grevious sin as premature optimization. -- Keith Devens

640K ought to be enough for anybody. -- Bill Gates, 1981

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

When you’ve got the code all ripped apart, it’s like a car that’s all disassembled. You’ve got all the parts tying all over your garage and you have to replace the broken part or the car will never run. It’s not fun until the code gets back to the baseline again. -- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. –Bob Dylan

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work. ~Thomas J. Watson

Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs. –Farrah Gray

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. ~Margaret Thatcher