Intellectual activity nurtures an inner life, a human core that is a refuge from suffering as much as it is a resource for reflection for its own sake.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

…the problem about programming is not that we haven’t found the right syntax for it but that people have to learn this unnatural act.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

The hard problems around legacy modernization are not technical problems; they’re people problems. The technology is usually pretty straightforward.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Sympathy for all would be tyranny for thee, my good neighbor.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground