Vim is the only thing proven to make you awesome.

— David Bryant Copeland, SOLID Is Not Solid

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

— Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote

…unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

What this has taught me I think all of us had better learn. There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers. This can certainly give us hope for the future of the species even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.

— Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality

When we’re focused on the search for truth, we’ll begin by doubting the existence of the objects of sense-perception and imagination. There are two reasons for this: (1) We have occasionally found our senses to be in error, and it’s not wise to place much trust in anyone or anything that has deceived us even once. (2) In our sleep we regularly seem to see or imagine things that don’t exist anywhere; and while we are doubting there seem to be no absolutely reliable criteria to distinguish being asleep from being awake.

— Rene Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy