Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
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Quotes
A collection of things people have said that stuck with me. Every attribution is linked — click through to a dedicated page, or search and filter below.
The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build fresh rather than complicate old programs.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
If I lack awareness, why should I care what happens to me when I'm dead?
The mob is the mother of tyrants.
If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes.
If I were not Diogenes, I would also wish to be Diogenes.
Nature gave us one tongue but two ears so that we may listen twice as much as we speak.
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Make it work, make it right, make it fast.
The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.
I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
If the result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period = 1 at −1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isn't binary — the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is machine dependent.