After surveying more than 4000 projects, Capers Jones reported that the software industry on the whole is probably about 35 percent efficient (Jones 1994). The other 65 percent of the time is spent on harmful or unproductive activities such as use of productivity tools that don’t work, repair of carelessly developed modules, work lost because of lack of configuration control, and so on.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

…if you get to the point where if you were to remove anything more it would not work any more—at this point it is beautiful.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert, French novelist…

— Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

Skepticism is a way of silencing fanaticism; skepticism is a way of liberating dogmatic minds.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle

Kant had taught that absolute Newtonian space and the principle of uniform causality are a priori principles of thought, necessary conditions on how human beings comprehend the world in which they live. Physics proved him totally mistaken. Cause and effect were mere appearance, and indeterminacy was at the root of reality.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions