Published collections of successful models can be helpful, as discussed in Chapter 11, but we shouldn’t get sidetracked trying to reduce domain modeling to a cookbook or a toolkit. Modeling and design call for creativity.

— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design

If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably one of the countless clichés…

— William Zinsser, On Writing Well

Software development is neither a scientific nor an engineering task. It is an act of reality construction that is political and artistic.

— David West, Object Thinking

If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that [you harbour in your heart] … the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable … people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

the nature of man is not his internal structure but the network of personal, familial and social interactions within which he exists.

— Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems