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

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald Knuth

Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM, which is more than any application will ever need. -- Microsoft, on the development of Windows NT, 1992

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. -- Joel Spolsky (The Law of Leaky Abstractions)

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)

Heureux l'étudiant qui comme la Rivière peut suivre son cours sans quitter son lit... -- Sebastien, sur commentcamarche.net

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. ~Steve Jobs

Dream big and dare to fail. –Norman Vaughan

Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice. ~Wayne Dyer

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing. ~Dale Carnegie