The best is the enemy of the good. -- Voltaire

I think it is wise, and only honest, to warn you that my goal is immodest. It is not my purpose to "transfer knowledge" to you that, subsequently, you can forget again. My purpose is no less than to effectuate in each of you a noticeable, irreversable change. I want you to gain, for the rest of your lives, the insight that beautiful proofs are not "found" by trial anf error but are the result of a consciously applied design discipline. I want you to raise your quality standards. I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me. -- E. W. Dijkstra

The best way to learn to live with our limitations is to know them. --E. W. Dijkstra, The humble programmer

A person won't become proficient at something until he or she has done it many times. In other words., if you want someone to be really good at building a software system, he or she will have to have built 10 or more systems of that type. -- Philip Greenspun

A tail call allows a function to return the result of another function without leaving an entry on the stack. Tail recursion is a specific case of tail calling. -- ASPN : Python Cookbook : Explicit Tail Call

Remember that you are humans in the first place and only after that programmers. -- Alexandru Vancea

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all. ~Dale Carnegie

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. –Steve Jobs

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. –Amelia Earhart

Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. –Joshua J. Marine