Are you willing to wear your white belt? -- George Leonard, Mastery.

It’s hard to grasp abstractions if you don’t understand what they’re abstracting away from. -- Nathan Weizenbaum

Let me try to get this straight: Lisp is a language for describing algorithms. This was JohnMcCarthy's original purpose, anyway: to build something more convenient than a Turing machine. Lisp is not about file, socket or GUI programming - Lisp is about expressive power. (For example, you can design multiple object systems for Lisp, in Lisp. Or implement the now-fashionable AOP. Or do arbitrary transformations on parsed source code.) If you don't value expressive power, Lisp ain't for you. I, personally, would prefer Lisp to not become mainstream: this would necessarily involve a dumbing down. -- VladimirSlepnev

In OO, it's the data that is the "important" thing: you define the class which contains member data, and only incidentally contains code for manipulating the object. In FP, it's the code that's important: you define a function which contains code for working with the data, and only incidentally define what the data is. -- almkgor, on reddit

Lisp programmers know the value of everything but the cost of nothing. -- Alan J. Perlis

Revolutions come from standing on the shoulders of giants and facing in a better direction. -- Alan Kay

Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. ~Lolly Daskal

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

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus. ~Bruce Lee

Dream big and dare to fail. –Norman Vaughan