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

And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. -- Joel Spolsky

[How friendly will this machine be?] Well, I don’t think it’s a matter of friendliness, because ultimately if the program is going to accomplish anything of value, it will probably be relatively complex. -- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. -- Alan Kay

There are many ways to avoid success in life, but the most sure-fire just might be procrastination. -- Hara Estroff Marano.

Dont give users the opportunity to lock themselves. -- unknown

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. –Dalai Lama

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. ~Francis Chan

I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear. –Rosa Parks

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