Product design and release processes cannot turn good designers into great ones. They rarely produce great designs without a great designer. But the disciplines imposed can bring up the low end of the design curve and improve the average performance of the art.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life …. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

— Samuel H. Barondes, Making Sense of People

Why such a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable oil.

— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Our biological essence, our instinct remnants, are weak and subtle, and they are hard to get at. Learnings of the extrinsic sort are more powerful than our deepest impulses. These deepest impulses in the human species, at the points where the instincts have been lost almost entirely, where they are extremely weak, extremely subtle and delicate, where you have to dig to find them, this is where I speak of introspective biology, of biological phenomenology, implying that one of the necessary methods in the search for self, the search for spontaneity and for naturalness is a matter of closing your eyes, cutting down the noise, turning off the thoughts, putting away all busyness, just relaxing in a kind of Taoistic and receptive fashion.

— Abraham Maslow, Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Bits that are embodied as structure (varying in space, invariant across time) we perceive as memory, and bits that are embodied as sequence (varying in time, invariant across space) we perceive as code. Gates are the intersections where bits span both worlds at the moments of transition from one instant to the next.

— George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral