But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

All these counterproductive ways of thinking about failure manifest themselves most acutely in the phenomenon of perfectionism. This is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not so secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw – yet perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live. (There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.)

— Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote

He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion!

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

Were GUIs a brilliant design innovation that made computers more human-centered and therefore accessible to the masses, leading us toward an unprecedented revolution in human society, or an insulting bit of audiovisual gimcrackery dreamed up by flaky Bay Area hacker types that stripped computers of their power and flexibility and turned the noble and serious work of computing into a childish video game?

— Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…Was the Command Line

A characteristic of insecure people is that they try to make others feel inferior either by talking way above their level or by being condescending. The job of a secure person is to figure out how to speak to others at their level of understanding.

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs