The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton

Technical quality is a long-term game. There’s no such thing as winning, only learning and earning the chance to keep playing.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

…the creative nature of software development requires that people take risks and occasionally fail; for people to accept that failure, a healthy team environment must exist.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

It did, however, fail to appreciate that scientific and other forms of liberal reasoning (such as arguments in favor of democracy and capitalism) are not so much metanarratives (though they can adopt these) as imperfect but self-correcting processes that apply a productive and actionable form of skepticism to everything, including themselves.

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

But I think a big sin in our area, in engineering, is doing stuff just because it’s neat, because it’s good engineering, whatever. If you’re not solving real problems for real users—in this case, Java programmers—then you shouldn’t add the feature.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work