Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painter

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

— Edsger W.Dijkstra, How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt?

I shall go on saying in my usual way, ‘My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?’ And should any of you dispute that, and profess that he does care about such things, I won’t let him go straight away nor leave him, but will question and examine and put him to the test … I shall do this to everyone I meet, young or old, foreigner or fellow-citizen.

— Plato, Apology of Socrates

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).

— Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness

Labels are ephemeral; they tell you about as much about the structure of a graph as the list of colors tells you about the structure of a painting.

— Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory