Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon movie

Fear... is the price of our instrument(imagination).

Claude Lévi-Strauss, French Anthropologist

One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

Donald Knuth

The journey is more important than the destination—that’s part of life.

If you only live for getting to the end, you’re almost always disappointed.

Alfred North Whitehead

God makes the animals, man makes himself.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

Donald Knuth, Coders at Work book

I think it’s probably more that I’ll try harder things. I always try

things that are at my limit. If I had to go back and write those kinds of

programs again, the easier ones, I wouldn’t make so many mistakes. But

now that I know some more, I’m trying to write harder stuff. So I make

mistakes because I’m always operating at my limit. If I only stay in

comfortable territory all the time, that’s not so much fun.

James Cameron, film director

"If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success."

John Keats

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

There's nothing stable in the world;uproar's your only music.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

Quoted by Stroustrup in The C++ PL 3rd Edition

‘‘... and you, Marcus, you have given me many things; now I shall give you this good

advice. Be many people. Give up the game of being always Marcus Cocoza. You

have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave

and prisoner. You have not done anything without first considering how it would

affect Marcus Cocoza’s happiness and prestige. You were always much afraid that

Marcus might do a stupid thing, or be bored. What would it really have mattered? All

over the world people are doing stupid things ... I should like you to be easy, your little

heart to be light again. You must from now, be more than one, many people, as

many as you can think of ...’’

– Karen Blixen

(‘‘The Dreamers’’ from ‘‘Seven Gothic Tales’’)

Steve Wozniak, Apple, as quoted in Founders at Work

My whole life was basically trying to optimize things. 

You don’t just save parts, but every time you save parts 

you save on complexity and reliability, the amount of time 

it takes to understand something. And how good you can build

it without errors and bugs and flaws.

... design them on paper and try to get better and better and better. I was

competing with myself. But that’s just the story of how my skill got so good. It’s

because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up

with ideas that nobody else would come up with.

All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.

I had no tools; my approach in life was to just use my own knowledge. I know what’s

going on better if I’m not going through a tool.

He would ask questions like, “What’s the market?” And I’d say, “A million.” And he’d say,

“How do you know?” And I said, “Well, there’s a million ham radio operators,

and computers are more popular than ham radio.” Nobody in the world could

ever deny that. But it’s not the sort of analysis that they wanted. And there were

no analysts yet that were predicting that this was going to be a big marketplace

anyway.

If there was any engineering to do, hardware or software, I did it, because Steve could do stuff, but he couldn’t do it as well as I. So never once did he even try.

Livingston: What is the key to excellence for an engineer?

Wozniak: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail.

You have to be so careful that you haven’t left something out. You have to think

harder and deeper than you normally would. It’s hard with today’s large, huge

programs.

Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to

your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities.