Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life. Reason may play the critic, and correct certain errors afterwards; but if we were to wait for its formal and absolute decisions in the shifting and multifarious combinations of human affairs, the world would stand still.

— William Hazlitt , On Prejudice

…enthusiasm without planning can do more harm than good.

— Jonathan A. Levi, The Only Skill That Matters

If the immediate and direct purpose of life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world

— Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

The folly of engineering culture is that we are often ashamed of signing up our organization for a future rewrite by picking the right architecture for right now, but we have no misgivings about producing systems that are difficult for others to understand and therefore impossible to maintain.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

We do not know whether the language designers are geniuses, or we ordinary programmers are cripples.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming