the ultimate unit test is whether or not users want to use your application. All the other tests you write are totally irrelevant until you can get that one to pass.

— Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), Effective Programming

Sometimes failure is just failure, nothing more. We do not always ‘turn a new leaf’, ‘understand that everything happens for a reason’, or extract that ever-evanescent ‘silver lining’. We can learn that some demands are unreasonable, that our world and ourselves are ridden with cracks, and that there is a fundamental precariousness in all expectations of success.

— Costica Bradatan, In Praise of Failure

Before the program manager can be worth anything to the team, he or she must be thoroughly disabused of the notion that he or she has any direct control. –Jim McCarthy…

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

Without suffering, what pleasure would there be in it—everything would turn into an endless prayer service: holy, but a bit dull.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now