Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)

The wonderful and frustrating thing about understanding yourself is that nobody can do it for you. -- BetterExplained.com

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -- Blaise Pascal (attributed)

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger Dijkstra

Abstraction is a form of data compression: absolutely necessary, because human short-term memory is so small, but the critically important aspect of abstraction is the algorithm that gets you from the name back to the "uncompressed" details. -- Bruce Wilder (blog post comment)

What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will. -- Paul Graham

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

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. –Wayne Gretzky

You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. –Christopher Columbus

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