***************************************************
A few of the good quotes I read or heard along the way
***************************************************


********

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief 
requirements of life, when all that we need to make us 
happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

- Charles Kingsley

********

"Everything was better back when everything was worse off"

- Barry Schwartz, in a talk ("The Paradox of Choice") 
part of  Google TechTalks series, April 27, 2006.

********

"You mean, if you allow the master to be uncivil, to treat you
any old way he likes, and to insult your dignity, then he may deem you
fit to hear his view of things?"
"Quite the contrary.  You must defend your integrity, assuming
you have integrity to defend.  But you must defend it nobly, not by
imitating his own low behavior.  If you are gentle where he is rough,
if you are polite where he is uncouth, then he will recognize you as
potentially worthy.  If he does not, then he is not a master, after all,
and you may feel free to kick his ass."

- Tom Robbins, "Jitterbug Perfume"

********

"When my students come to me for advice, I tell them, 
the hard part is not about which experiments to do,
but knowing which experiments not to do."

- Thomas Kornberg
In a biology colloquium talk at UC-Berkeley

********

"Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things."

- Jules Henri Poincaré
In response to the quote: "Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing"

********

"Real men use one camera."

- Jitendra Malik
In an informal discussion during computer vision meeting

********

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them
better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena;
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives
valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the
great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a
worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high
achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while
daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and
timid souls who know neither defeat nor victory.

- Theodore Roosevelt

********

"Computers are like Old Testament gods; 
lots of rules and no mercy."

"If you can see your path laid out in front of you
step by step, you know it's not your path."

- Joseph Campbell

********

"Remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. 
The brick walls are not there to keep us out, 
they are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.

Because the brick walls are there to stop people who don't want it badly enough. 
They are there to stop the 'other' people."

- Randy Pausch, in his talk at CMU: "Really achieving your childhood dreams"

********

"We could, for instance, begin with cleaning up our 
language by no longer calling a bug a bug but by calling 
it an error. It is much more honest because it squarely 
puts the blame where it belongs, viz. with the programmer 
who made the error."

"The moral of the story is: deal with all elements of 
a set by ignoring them and working with the set's definition."

- Edsger W. Dijkstra
"On the cruelty of really teaching computing science"
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html

********

"In order to fly, it is important to believe that you can."

- Alan Oppenheim, "A Personal View of Education"
IEEE SP Magazine, April 1992.

********

"Sometimes I pause and sadly think
Of all the things that might have been. 
Of all the golden chances I let slip by, 
And which never returned again.
 
It fills me with gloom when I ponder this, 
Till I look on the other side. 
How I might have been completely 
engulfed by misfortune's surging tide."

- G.J. Russell

********

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."

- Mark Twain

********

"There is a growing mountain of research.  But there is
increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as 
specialization extends.  The investigator is staggered by 
the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers 
- conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less 
to remember, as they appear.  Yet specialization becomes 
increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to 
bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial."

- Vannevar Bush, in "As We May Think", 
The Atlantic Monthly, 1945.

********

"A practical profession is a salvation for a man of my type;
an academic career compels a young man to scientific 
production, and only strong characters can resist the 
temptation of superficial analysis." 

- Albert Einstein

********

"I learned one really sad fact from my career as a columnist:
nobody changes their mind about anything. Ever. Once we form
the opinion, we become evidence processors and we just 
collect all the evidence that supports our opinion and reject
all the evidence that disputes it."  

— Bob Metcalfe 

********

"He rises fastest who knows not whither he is going."

- Oliver Cromwell

********