“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

        — Antoine de Saint Exupéry

“The early bird might get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

        — Unknown

“My great mistake, the fault for which I can’t forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.”

        — Oscar Wilde

“The (computer) mouse is probably the narrowest straw you could try and suck all of human expression through.”

        — Joy Mountford

When we “solve” copyright problems at the expense of the Internet, we solve them at the expense of 21st-century society as a whole.

        — Cory Doctorow, It’s Time to Stop Talking About Copyright

“A good wife always forgives her husband when she’s wrong.”

        — Rodney Dangerfield

“Everyone around me seems to be taking a break from their mental health to focus on social media.”

        — Deniz Opal

“Then what are we fighting for?”

        — Winston Churchill in response to a suggestion of cutting arts funding to support the war effort

“They say if you play that Microsoft CD backward you hear satanic messages. But that’s nothing, if you play it forward it installs Windows.”

“I don’t understand how the people of Tunisia overthrew their government without me signing an e-petition or changing my Twitter avatar.”

        — Matt Bailey (@mattb811)

“Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them.”

        — Andrew V. Mason

“UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.”

        — Doug Gwyn

“‘Need’ is irrelevant here. People do not need phones. They need food, shelter, and running faster than lions.”

        — Thomas Pornin in The DMZ

“Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.”

        — Rich Kulawiec

“There is no failure. Only feedback.”

        — Robert Allen

“Ordinary people need to lead and not sit there and think that governments are going to spoon feed them.”

        — Ian Kiernan

“Outside noisy, inside empty.”

        — Chinese Proverb

If you ever code something that “feels like a hack but it works,” just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking.

        — Ben Driscoll (@daisyowl)

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

        — Mark Twain

“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”

        — Michel de Montaigne

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

        — George Bernard Shaw

“A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself.”

        — Doug Larson

“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.”

        — Jean-Michel Basquiat

“What one sees depends on how one sees.”

        — Søren Kierkegaard

“Remember, good code is like a good joke: It needs no explanation.”

        — Unknown

“Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?”

        — Ernest Gaines

“As a nation we are dedicated to keeping physically fit – and parking as close to the stadium as possible.”

        — Bill Vaughan

“O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.”

        — William Penn

“We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.”

        — May 1968 Graffiti #

“Telling a programmer there’s already a library to do X is like telling a songwriter there’s already a song about love.”

        — Pete Cordell

“A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.”

        — Howard Scott

“A Platypus is a duck designed by a committee.”

        — Unknown

“The first time I see a jogger smiling, I’ll consider it.”

        — Joan Rivers

“I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.”

        — Horace Greeley

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

        — Plato

“Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.”

        — P. J. O’Rourke

“Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.”

        — Isaac Wolkerstorfer (@agnoster)

“I am pushing sixty. That is enough exercise for me.”

        — Mark Twain

“Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.”

        — Albert Einstein

“I know it’s impossible, but can you do it anyway?”

        — Unknown, from Clients From Hell

If anyone tells you that such a person speaks ill of you, don’t make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: “He does not know my other faults, else he would not have mentioned only these.”

        — Epictetus

“Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.”

        — Will Rogers

“If you can put an axe through it, it’s hardware; if you want to put an axe through it, it’s software.”

        — Unknown

“I’m going to buy him a copy of the Mythical Man Month. Actually I’m going to buy him two copies so he can read it twice as fast.”

        — Unknown

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

        — Scott Adams

“Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect.”

        — Benny Hill

“You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”

        — Navajo Proverb

“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.”

        — George E. Woodberry

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”

        — Jorge Luis Borges

“Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.”

        — Rabindranath Tagore

Haikus are easy,
but sometimes they don’t make sense.
Refrigerator

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you just might miss it.”

        — Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“Could you make it less literal and more obvious?”

        — Unknown, from Clients From Hell

“Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.”

        — Soren Kierkegaard

“Sometimes the most unnecessary parts are the most necessary parts.”

        — Caleb

“Never mistake motion for action.”

        — Ernest Hemingway

“I am driven by two main philosophies: know more about the world than I knew yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.”

        — Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I remember when social networking was something that happened in person. How awkward.”

        — Caprice Crane

“All the coffee in Columbia won’t make me a morning person.”

        — Unknown

“The wages of sin are death, but after they take the taxes out, it’s more like a tired feeling.”

        — Paula Poundstone

“They make it look so easy. Connecting with another human being. It’s like no one told them it’s the hardest thing in the world.”

        — Dexter, “The Big One”

“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.”

        — Sandra Carey

“It’s not whether you win or lose – but whether I win or lose.”

        — Sandy Lyle

“Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.”

        — Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.”

        — Edna Woolman Chase

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

        — Unknown

“Age is not important unless you’re a cheese.”

        — Helen Hays

“Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves what he gets.”

        — Neil Gaiman

“An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.”

        — Dwight Eisenhower

“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.”

        — George Jean Nathan

“The (computer) mouse is probably the narrowest straw you could try and suck all of human expression through.”

        — Joy Mountford

“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”

        — Arthur Miller

“Self improvement is great, but I’d rather rely on coffee to solve all of my problems.”

“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

        — Theodore Roosevelt

“Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.”

        — Indira Gandhi

“Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be.”

        — Duncan Trussell

“You just have to make the transition from weird to eccentric and then you’re okay.”

        — John Elder Robinson

“It was pretty much an accident because I didn’t mean it!”

        — Raven Hinton, aged 8

“Be the ancient advanced alien race you want to see in the universe.”

        — @futurebird@sauropods.win

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

        — Unknown

“A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool”

        — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

“You’re making this too complicated when it’s really quite simple. All you have to do is make the software completely configurable so it can do whatever I need it to.”

        — Unknown, from Clients From Hell

“No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can’t increase the speed of light.”

        — R. Callon, RFC1925: The Twelve Networking Truths

“You can safely assume you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

        — Ann Lamott

“Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.”

        — Rita Mae Brown

“If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.”

        — Unknown

“You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”

        — Sam Keen

“Don’t judge those who try and fail, judge those who fail to try.”

        — Unknown

“Eagles may soar high, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.”

        — John Benfield

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

        — John F. Kennedy, 1962

“Technology doesn’t make us dumb. It just allows us to make others aware of how dumb we are.”

        — Caprice Crane (@capricecrane)

“The easiest way to save face is to keep the lower half shut.”

        — Unknown

“All the world’s a stage! And here I am in the blooper reel!”

        — Ziggy by Tom Wilson

“Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.”

        — Carl Bard

“I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.”

        — Winston Churchill

“The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.”

        — Rita Mae Brown

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”

        — Shelby Foote

“There are only two things software professionals dislike: the way things are, and change.”

        — Tobias Mayer (@tobiasmayer)

“A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point.”

        — Mistinguett

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”

        — Jack London

“Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it necessary? Is it true? Does it improve upon the silence?”

        — Shirdi Sai Baba

“The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.”

        — William Gibson

“Faith can move mountains, but don’t be surprised if God hands you a shovel.”

        — Unknown

“Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.”

        — John Quinton

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”

        — Milton Berle

“Like I’ve always said, love wouldn’t be blind if the braille weren’t so damned much fun.”

        — Armistead Maupin, Maybe the Moon

“Laughter is a part of the human survival kit.”

        — David Nathan

“Work like you owe money to a Russian, love like you’ve never looked in the mirror, dance like a drunk badger attacking a hedge.”

        — Dolly (@TheDollSays)

“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

        — Woody Allen

“No man drowns if he perseveres in praying to God, and can swim.”

        — Russian Proverb

“It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.”

        — Saint Francis of Assisi

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”

        — John Cage

“If you trip over a pun in your speaking it’s not so bad but to intentionally jump on one is a true offence.”

        — Graycie Harmon

“He bites his tongue who speaks in haste.”

        — Turkish Proverb

“If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”

        — Tallulah Bankhead

“Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.”

        — William Safire

If you ever code something that “feels like a hack but it works,” just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking.

        — Ben Driscoll (@daisyowl)

“If you were happy every day of your life you wouldn’t be human. You’d be a game-show host.”

        — Heathers

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”

        — Edward O. Wilson, sociobiologist

“I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me.”

        — Sigmund Freud

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

        — Oscar Wilde

“One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions.”

        — Grace Hopper

“If you are using PowerPoint to even 25% of its potential, your presentation will probably suck.”

        — Karl Seguin, Goodbye Microsoft Office

“Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.”

        — Anne Lamott

“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.”

        — Paul Boese

“Abnormal: doing something more often than a psychologist would.”

        — Tony Atwood, MSc PhD AFBPsS MAPS MCCP

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”

        — Rabindranath Tagore

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

        — Maya Angelou

“If you can put an axe through it, it’s hardware; if you want to put an axe through it, it’s software.”

        — Unknown

“Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week”

        — Spanish Proverb

“The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it’s unfamiliar territory.”

        — Paul Fix

“The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.”

        — Mark Russell

“What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul.”

        — Yiddish Proverb

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

        — Bill Cosby

“The wowser mistakes the world for a penitentiary and themselves as the warden.”

        — Australian observation

“Always be nice to people on the way up; because you’ll meet the same people on the way down.”

        — Wilson Mizner

“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.”

        — Barnett Cocks

“If you lend someone twenty dollars, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.”

        — Unknown

“Perfection [in design] is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

        — St Antoine de Exupéry

“My writing process: 50 percent pacing, 20 percent snacks, 18 percent furious weeping, 12 percent actual writing.”

        — Brendan I. Koerner (@brendankoerner)

“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

        — Oscar Wilde

“Vegetarian: A person who eats only side dishes.”

        — Gerald Lieberman

“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

        — Andre Gide

“The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath.”

        — Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart

“Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.”

        — Rich Kulawiec

“Bore: A man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”

        — Gian Vincenzo Gravina

“Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.”

        — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Saints are sinners who kept on going.”

        — Robert Louis Stevenson

“When it comes to making a big change in your life, you have to want it more than you fear it.”

        — Unknown

“I don’t mind suffering is silence, as long as everyone knows I’m suffering in silence."

        — Boho the hippopotamus, from the Jungle Doctor story, “Sweet and Sour Hippo”

“Risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.”

        — Leo Buscaglia

“Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.”

        — Indira Gandhi

It amazes me that the same people that consider “developers” fungible are upset when the resources consider them equally exchangeable.

        — Torbjörn Gyllebring (@drunkcod)

“A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.”

        — Henrik Ibsen

“Depression means you cannot enjoy cats on the Internet.”

        — Paul Fenwick (watch @pjf’s five minute talk on YouTube)

My personal pet peeve is how many people think the hard part is in the “big and hard problems” or in some fluffy but important-sounding thing like “innovation”. In fact, all the real work is in getting the details right. It’s that “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” thing. People seem to think that inspiration is the much bigger and important part of the two, but I’ve come to believe that while it’s important to have inspiration, where people actually stumble is when they can’t execute on that inspiration. Inspiration isn’t that rare in the end, but people who have it and then actually follow through… that’s rare.

        — Linus Torvalds

“I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.”

        — Banksy

“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.”

        — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“So long as there’s a jingle in your head, television isn’t free.”

        — Jason Love

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”

        — Satchel Paige

“I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.”

        — Winston Churchill

“It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out, it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.”

        — Unknown

“Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to.”

        — Anonymous

“Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.”

        — Will Rogers

“If Tetris has taught me anything, it’s that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.”

        — Mana (@damana)

“Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.”

        — Ursula K. Le Guin

“He who has begun is half done.”

        — Horace

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

        — John F. Kennedy, 1962

“Capslock does not make technical support want to help you more.”

        — Lindsay (Trampoline Sept 2010)

“Sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug.”

        — Mark Knopfler

“The first time I see a jogger smiling, I’ll consider it.”

        — Joan Rivers

“The problem with Test-Driven Development is that you have to think about what you want the code to do before you write it. And that ruins the surprise.”

        — Jason Gorman

“Three words, eight letters, three syllables, five vowels, three consonants, two nouns, one emotion, many meanings, a big lie, a rare truth: I LOVE YOU!”

        — MJ (@_iamMJ)

“I believe humans get a lot done, not because we’re smart, but because we have thumbs so we can make coffee.”

        — Flash Rosenberg

“The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly and lie about your age.”

        — Lucille Ball

“The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.”

        — Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic

“Then what are we fighting for?”

        — Winston Churchill in response to a suggestion of cutting arts funding to support the war effort

“I prefer the word homemaker, because housewife always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.”

        — Bella Abzug

“It’s only impossible if you stop to think about it!”

        — The Pirates! Band of Misfits

“Remember, you can do work outside of your paid hours as well.”

        — Clients From Hell

“There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.”

        — Josh Billings

“When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.”

        — Voltaire

“He was jeopardising his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.”

        — Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“I remember when social networking was something that happened in person. How awkward.”

        — Caprice Crane

“He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth I’m kinda glad he hit you.”

        — “The Magicians” by Lev Grossman

“Respect for the truth is an acquired taste.”

        — Mark van Doren

“It’s not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It’s what you do with your life that counts.”

        — Millard Fuller

“The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.”

        — Rita Mae Brown

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you just might miss it.”

        — Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“No man is a failure who is enjoying life.”

        — William Feather

“Prejudices about what it means to be a person necessarily exclude those who are not bright on the stage of common action; those who do not welcome the glare of shining, blinding smiles, who do not lean closer to hear the roar and macramé of shouted words, who do not cut themselves and mould their flesh and spirit to fit the narrow human path, funnelling upward without looking back.”

        — Dawn Prince-Hughes, Songs of the Gorilla Nation

“In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends.”

        — John Churton Collins

“Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be.”

        — Duncan Trussell

“He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

        — Albert Einstein

“Ever since I discovered Twitter, I’ve been trying to stop using it.”

        — Giles Bowkett

“My shoes probably think I died.”

        — Bαѕєм|باسم #QuarantineQuotes

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

        — Aristotle

“To avoid criticism , do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”

        — Elbert Green Hubbard

“A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool”

        — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

“You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.”

        — Ziggy by Tom Wilson

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.”

        — Oscar Wilde

“Everybody wants to eat at the government’s table, but nobody wants to do the dishes.”

        — Werner Finck

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”

        — Howard Aiken

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

        — Saint Augustine

“No matter what it is I’m doing, there’s always about an 85% chance I’m supposed to be doing something else.”

        — Caprice Crane (@CapricecCrane)

“It is wise to keep in mind that no success or failure is necessarily final.”

        — Unknown

“Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales.”

        — Byron J. Langenfeld

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”

        — Emma Goldman

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.”

        — Garrison Keillor

“Never tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.”

        — Unknown

“Sometimes there is a silver bullet for boosting software engineering productivity. But you need to shoot the right person.”

        — Michael Stal (@stal_m)

“Decaffeinated coffee is the devil’s blend.”

        — Unknown

When we “solve” copyright problems at the expense of the Internet, we solve them at the expense of 21st-century society as a whole.

        — Cory Doctorow, It’s Time to Stop Talking About Copyright

“You can’t build a reputation on what you intend to do.”

        — Liz Smith

“If the guy next to you is swearing like a wharfie he’s probably a billionaire. Or, just conceivably, a wharfie.”

        — Australian observation

“Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.”

        — Isaac Wolkerstorfer (@agnoster)

“The worst thing to be is successful as someone else.”

        — Jay-Z

“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”

        — Michel de Montaigne

“Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It’ll be the only one trying.”

        — Jack Lang

“Stand at the brink of despair, and when you see that you cannot bear it anymore, draw back a little, and have a cup of tea.”

        — Sophrony Sakharov

“As long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master once you utter it, you are its slave.”

        — Solomon Ibn Gabirol

“Scratch a dog and you’ll find a permanent job.”

        — Franklin P. Jones

“Critical decisions need to be made as late as possible, but before they make themselves.”

        — Mary Poppendieck, YOW! 2010

“An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.”

        — Dwight Eisenhower

“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.”

        — Sandra Carey

“I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

        — Thomas Jefferson

“Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn’t have anything to do with it.”

        — Haim Ginott

“Could you make it less literal and more obvious?”

        — Unknown, from Clients From Hell

“Always hold your head up, but be careful to keep your nose at a friendly level.”

        — Max L. Forman

“Failing organisations are usually over-managed and under-led.”

        — Warren G. Bennis

“When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they’re finished, I climb out.”

        — Erma Bombeck

“Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Supidity is the same. And that’s why life is hard.”

        — Jeremy Goldberg

“The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

        — Alex Carey

“I’m toying with the idea of becoming a useful member of society.”

        — Wally from Dilbert, by Scott Adams