Favourite Quotes

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have Love… and if I have the gift of prophecy and can move mountains, but do not have Love, I'm nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. Love is not proud, it does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the Truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres…”

—Šāʼûl (שָׁאוּל) / Apostle Paul, First Epistle to the Corinthians

“A big definition of who you are as a designer is the way you're looking at the world, and it's kind of a curse: you're constantly looking at something and thinking why, why is it like that? Why is it like that and not like this? and in that sense you're constantly designing. In fact, a lot of what we seem to be doing is actually getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and not just arbitrary manufactured shapes, it feels almost inevitable, almost undesigned.”

—Jonathan Ive (Former chief designer @ Apple), on Design

“The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.”

—Paul Graham, What You'll Wish You'd Known (archive)

“I've reached the conclusion that Operating Systems are not radically different from other programs. They are just large programs based on the principles of a more fundamental subject: parallel programming.”

—P.B. Hansen, Operating System Principles, ACM Classics

“I would like to see Computer Science teaching set deliberately in a historical framework… Students need to understand how the present situation has come about, what was tried, what worked and what did not, and how improvements in hardware made progress possible. The absence of this element in their training causes people to approach every problem from first principles. They are apt to propose solutions that have been found wanting in the past. Instead of standing on the shoulders of their precursors, they try to go it alone.”

—Maurice V. Wilkes

“Allow me to introduce: The General. All the professor's own work; he gave birth to it and loves it with a passionate love, probably hates it even more. That mass of circuits, my dear fellow, is as revolutionary as nuclear fission. No more wastage in schools; there's no more tedious learning by rote. A brilliantly devised course, delivered by a leading teacher, subliminally learned, checked, and corrected by an infallible authority. And what have we got..” Six: “A row of cabbages!” Two: “Indeed! knowledgeable cabbages.”

—The Prisoner, Episode 6 (November 1967), The General

“Do not judge, lest you be judged… And why do you look at the splinter that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the plank in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then shall you see clearly...”

—Yəhōšūa (יְהוֹשֻׁעַ) / Jesus Ch., Mattithyahu (מתתיהו)

“By living as if God did not exist, man not only loses sight of the mystery of God, but also of the mystery of the world and the mystery of his own being. The eclipse of the sense of God and of man invevitably leads to practical materialism, which breeds individualism, utilitarianism, and hedonism... The values of «being» are replaced by those of «having». The only goal which counts is the pursuit of one's own material well-being. The so-called quality of life is interpreted primarily or exclusively as economic efficiency, inordinate consumerism, physical beauty and pleasure, to the neglect of of the more profound dimensions —interpersonal, spiritual, and religuous— of existence.”

—John Paull II, Evangelium vitae (Vatican Encyclicals, March 1995)

“Und vergib uns unsere Schuld, wie auch wir vergeben unseren Schuldigern.”

—Yəhōšūa (יְהוֹשֻׁעַ) / Jesus Ch., Mattithyahu (מתתיהו)