To do something well you have to love it. So to the extent you can preserve hacking as something you love, you're likely to do it well. Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. If you're worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is. -- Paul Graham.

The proof is by reductio ad absurdum, and reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game. -- G. H. Hardy

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve. -- Pablo Picasso

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. -- Official definition of "duck typing"

1 - Creativity and innovation always build on the past. 2 - The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it. 3 - Free societies enable the future by limiting the past. 4 - Ours is less and less a free society. -- Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture.

I would rather be an optimist and be wrong than a pessimist who proves to be right. The former sometimes wins, but never the latter. -- "Hoots"

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absense of fear. ~Mark Twain

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. –Leonardo da Vinci

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. ~Steve Jobs

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. –Leonardo da Vinci