L’art qui satisfait le besoin le plus impérieux sera toujours le plus honoré. -- Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs.

A person won't retain proficiency at a task unless he or she has at one time learned to perform that task very rapidly. Learning research demonstrates that the skills of people who become accurate but not fast deteriorate much sooner than the skills of people who become both accurate and fast. -- Philip Greenspun

No problem should ever have to be solved twice. -- Eric S. Raymond, How to become a hacker

Lisp is a programmable programming language. -- John Foderaro

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as *lines produced* but as *lines spent*. -- Edsger Dijkstra

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

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. –Henry David Thoreau

Eighty percent of success is showing up. –Woody Allen

There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. –Roger Staubach

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