Knowing the syntax of a language is not enough to be a “programmer,” let alone to be a good programmer. Being “idiomatic in language X” is less valuable and less important than high—quality in design. Knowing the abstruse details of “API Y” does not make you a better software developer; you can always look up the answer to that kind of question! The real skills—the things that really differentiate great programmers from poor programmers—are not language-specific or framework-specific. They lie elsewhere.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

Adopting new practices doesn’t necessarily make technology better, but doing so almost always makes technology more complicated, and more complicated technology is hard to maintain and ultimately more prone to failure.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

It is your own responsibility to stop yourself from thinking cultishly, no matter which group you currently happen to be operating in.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind (Rationality

Learning must never stop. Blue dye is gotten from the indigo plant, and yet it is bluer than the plant. Ice comes from water, and yet it is colder than water. The gentleman learns broadly and examines himself thrice daily, and then his knowledge is clear and his conduct is without fault.

— Xun Kuang, Xunzi

…there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground