We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate causes of failure. -- Jared Diamond

We really have to get over the idea that some stuff is just worth knowing even if you never do anything with it. Human memories happily erase stuff that has no purpose, so why try to fill up children's heads with such stuff? -- Roger Schank, Engines for Education

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

A person won't become proficient at something until he or she has done it many times. In other words., if you want someone to be really good at building a software system, he or she will have to have built 10 or more systems of that type. -- Philip Greenspun

The choice of the university is mostly important for the piece of paper you get at the end. The education you get depends on you. -- Andreas Zwinkau

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)

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!” –Audrey Hepburn

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. –Booker T. Washington

Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. ~Anonymous