While I see her unusual talent for critical introspection, I think her talent is more easily overlooked than the mathematical creativity and intuition exhibited by some of our majors. She has these talents too, but humility and an ability to recognize what you don’t know can silence these talents in the group setting.

— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing

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