I think it is wise, and only honest, to warn you that my goal is immodest. It is not my purpose to "transfer knowledge" to you that, subsequently, you can forget again. My purpose is no less than to effectuate in each of you a noticeable, irreversable change. I want you to gain, for the rest of your lives, the insight that beautiful proofs are not "found" by trial anf error but are the result of a consciously applied design discipline. I want you to raise your quality standards. I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me. -- E. W. Dijkstra

The reason to do animation is caricature. Good caricature picks out the essense of the statement and removes everything else. It's not simply about reproducing reality; It's about bumping it up. -- Brad Bird, writer and director, The Incredibles

I think the root of your mistake is saying that macros don't scale to larger groups. The real truth is that macros don't scale to stupider groups. -- Paul Graham, on the Lightweight Languages mailing list.

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

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot. -- Eric S. Raymond

Getting back to failing early, I've learned it's important to completely fail. Get fired. Shoot the project, then burn its corpse. Melt the CVS repository and microwave the backup CDs. When things go wrong, I've often tried to play the hero from start to finish. Guess what? Some projects are doomed no matter what. Some need skills I don't possess. And some need a fresh face. -- Reginald Braithwaite

Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. –Teddy Roosevelt

Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. –W. Clement Stone

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. ~Vidal Sassoon

The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it. ~Henry Ford