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

The problem is that small examples fail to convince, and large examples are too big to follow. -- Steve Yegge.

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. -- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -- Mark Twain

In general, we can think of data as defined by some collection of selectors and constructors, together with specified conditions that these procedures must fulfill in order to be a valid representation. -- SICP, What is meant by data?

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not so sure about the former. -- Albert Einstein

It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. –Ann Landers

Fortune sides with him who dares. ~Virgil

Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out. ~John Wooden

We become what we think about. –Earl Nightingale