On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love.

— Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Instead of using computation to understand nature, they say, we will eventually accept that everything in nature is computation.

— Peter J. Denning and Matti Tedre, Computational Thinking

…you don’t want to start product development with everything designed up front. Your concept of what the new system will look like will be wrong in some minor ways you can’t possibly foresee.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

the ultimate unit test is whether or not users want to use your application. All the other tests you write are totally irrelevant until you can get that one to pass.

— Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), Effective Programming

Sometimes failure is just failure, nothing more. We do not always ‘turn a new leaf’, ‘understand that everything happens for a reason’, or extract that ever-evanescent ‘silver lining’. We can learn that some demands are unreasonable, that our world and ourselves are ridden with cracks, and that there is a fundamental precariousness in all expectations of success.

— Costica Bradatan, In Praise of Failure