While I’ve always appreciated beautiful code, I share Jonathan’s concern about studying it too much. I think studying beauty in music and painting has led us to modern classical music and painting that the majority of us just don’t get. Beauty can be seen when it emerges, but isn’t something to strive for in isolation of a larger context. In the software world, the larger context would be the utility of the software to the end user. -- [A comment on a blog]

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

Simplicity takes effort-- genius, even. -- Paul Graham

We are the sum of our behaviours; excellence therefore is not an act but a habit. -- Aristotle.

A society that puts equality -- in the sense of equality of outcome -- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. -- Milton Friedman (Thomas Sowell: A Conflict of Visions, p130)

The programmer must seek both perfection of part and adequacy of collection. -- Alan J. Perlis

The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning; to create a product or service to make the world a better place. ~Guy Kawasaki

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse. –Florence Nightingale

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. ~Francis Chan

Good things come to people who wait, but better things come to those who go out and get them. ~Anonymous