Leibniz died in 1716 at the age of seventy, almost completely forgotten. Only his secretary attended his funeral.

— E, Eli Maor

“T. S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth century: “When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.”

— How to Think, Alan Jacobs

Producing crap does not make you go faster, it makes you go slower. This is the lesson you learn after you’ve been a programmer for 20 or 30 years.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Agile

Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other.

— Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back

What’s true is that the sensation of mathematical understanding—of suddenly knowing what’s going on, with total certainty, all the way to the bottom—is a special thing, attainable in few if any other places in life. You feel you’ve reached into the universe’s guts and put your hand on the wire. It’s hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it.

— Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong