Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. -- William Strunk, Jr. (The Elements of Style)

Side projects are less masturbatory than reading RSS, often more useful than MobileMe, more educational than the comments on Reddit, and usually more fun than listening to keynotes. -- Chris Wanstrath

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense. -- E.W. Dijkstra

La connaissance d'un défaut ne l'enlève pas, elle nous torture jusqu'à sa correction. -- Daniel Lovewin (Guillaume Kpotufe)

Give up control. You never really had it anyway. -- How to fail: 25 secrets learned through failure

Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret. ~Earl Nightingale

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. ~Eleanor Roosevelt

You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them. ~Michael Jordan

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. –Plato