Paul Graham:
- Programming languages are not just technology, but what programmers think in. They're half technology and half religion.
- Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions.
- Life is another name of love; and love is nothing but being sensitive to beauty.
- Love dissolves identity. In love I'm not and you're not; only love is.
- More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
- What we do in life echoes in eternity.
- Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.
- The greatest of all weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak.
- In my experience, telling someone to switch Unix shells for ease of use is like telling him to switch cigarette brands for his health.
- But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest.
- Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
- Fight the battle of being "you" forever because it will always be the greatest battle you will ever have to fight, and its the only battle worth fighting.
- Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, a society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run, it creates a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.
- Advocating Object-Oriented Programming is like advocating Pants-Oriented Clothing.
- I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.
- Rest Neo, the answers are coming.
- To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.
- You didn't come here to make the choice; you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it.
- We can never see past the choices we don't understand.
- The real test for any choice is having to make the same choice again, knowing full well what it might cost.
- It must be hard being a king.
- Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.
- The world is more than we know.
- If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
- People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
- When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
- God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
- Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
- We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong.
- The purpose of life is to fight maturity.
From the novel Siddartha:
- And so it is: I'm on a pilgrimage.
- You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
- We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
- ... all institutions of the System [are] based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness.
- I am Phaedrus, that is who I am, and they are going to destroy me for speaking the truth.
- We're related to each other in ways we never fully understand, maybe hardly understand at all.
- "Is it hard?" "Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard."
- The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
- Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense.
- I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.
- One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
- Every hour has its end.
- A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
- If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
- If you wish for ecstasy, be prepared for agony; the deeper the roots of a tree can go down, the higher it can reach.
- Not reusing code is just plain evil.
