Quotes

Having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another

The end of a melody is not its goal

Information is not knowledge Knowledge is not wisdom Wisdom is not truth Truth is not beauty Beauty is not love Love is not music Music is the best.

I have this thought experiment I do in moments like that.... I imagine being nothing at all. Dead and gone. And while being dead and gone and nothing, you were allowed to re-live just one moment again of your long lost life for a just a couple minutes and it just so happens to be the one you are in living in right now. Its an amazing feeling. You will see your life with rare fresh eyes for just a few seconds. And then life goes on....

Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Security is mostly a superstition. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

I said to my soul, be still, wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

Humor is the only divine quality to be found in humanity.

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

Above all, don’t fear difficult moments. The best comes from them.

Take the path to Nothing, and go Nowhere until you reach it.

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.

Eventually, I decided that thinking was not getting me very far and it was time to try building.

It’s possible that I understand better what’s going on, or it’s equally possible that I just think I do.

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.

Reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

There is nothing worse than imagination without taste.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

If you obey all the rules, you will miss all the fun.

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

If you’re the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with smarter people in it.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

A good leader is someone whose troops will follow him, if only out of curiosity.

A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid having to exercise his superior skill.

The shortest path to exceeding expectations doesn’t generally pass through meeting expectations.

Your mind is credulous enough to believe any narrative you feed it. Choose wisely.

The most personal is the most creative.

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what’s right.

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

Morality is doing what’s right regardless of what you’re told. Obedience is doing what you’re told regardless of what is right.

You must defend people you disagree with, it is how you find out what your principles really are.

Brandolini’s law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.

The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who have not got it.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

One is never so dangerous as when he’s utterly convinced he is right.

I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended.

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

A witty saying proves nothing.

The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

Parkinson's law of triviality: Members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

Bikeshedding (Metaphor): Futile investment of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Rules of Programming

1. You can’t tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don’t try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you’ve proven that’s where the bottleneck is.
2. Measure. Don’t tune for speed until you’ve measured, and even then don’t unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don’t get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)
4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they’re much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.
5. Data dominates. If you’ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

• Pike’s rules 1 and 2 restate Donald Knuth/Tony Hoare’s famous maxim: Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
• Ken Thompson rephrased Pike’s rules 3 and 4 as: When in doubt, use brute force.
• Rules 3 and 4 are instances of the design philosophy KISS. Rule 5 was previously stated by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month.
• Rule 5 is often shortened to: write stupid code that uses smart objects.

Incompleteness theorem:

Any … formal system capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, … formal system that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in theory

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.