Hope is the rainbow over the cascading brook of life, swallowed up a hundred times by the spray.

— Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Kaufmann, The Gay Science

What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Without humility, a programmer is foredoomed to the classic pattern of Greek drama: success leading to overconfidence (hubris) leading to blind self-destruction. Sophocles himself could not frame a better plot (to reveal the inadequacy of our powers) than that of the programmer learning a few simple techniques, feeling that he is an expert, and then being crushed by the irresistible power of the computer (the Deus ex Machina).

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

…there is not much overlap between the kind of software that makes money and the kind that’s interesting to write.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Want to guarantee nasty conflicts? Take a word with multiple, fuzzy, definitions, force people to strike an agreement on it, attach large amounts of money to it, and then watch them fight about it a year or two later.

— Michael T. Nygard, Release It!