Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

The proceedings in the courts of law are generally a mystery to the lower officials as well; therefore they can almost never follow the progress of the cases they are working on throughout their course; the case enters their field of vision, often they know not whence, and continues on, they know not where. The lessons to be learned from the study of the individual stages of a trial, the final verdict and its basis, are lost to these officials. Their involvement is limited to that part of the trial circumscribed for them by the Law, and they generally know less about what follows, and thus about the results of their own efforts, than the defense, which as a rule remains in contact with the accused almost to the very end of the trial.

— Franz Kafka, The Trial

To every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

— David Komlos and David Benjamin, Cracking Complexity

Intuition, for one thing, is an elastic faculty: our children will probably have no difficulty in accepting as intuitively obvious the paradoxes of relativity, just as we do not boggle at ideas that were regarded as wholly unintuitive a couple of generations ago. Moreover, as we all know, intuition is not a safe guide: it cannot properly be used as a criterion of either truth or fruitfulness in scientific explorations.

— Ernest Nagel, James R. Newman, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel’s Proof

Nothing much new has happened in computers that you couldn’t have predicted. The last significant thing, I think, was the Internet, and that was certainly in place in ‘99. Everything has expanded—the speed of individual computers is still expanding exponentially, but what’s different?

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work