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34 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Peter Conrad in "A Song of Love and Death"
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Language with its disagreeably meaning ridden words is an enemy to musical joy.
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Henry Ward Beecher, Abolitionist and Clergyman, on the power of hiding
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The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.
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Seneca on Poverty
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Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'is this the condition that I feared?'
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Robertson Davies on the basis for civilization
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"Civilization rests on two things...the discovery that fernentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation."
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Happiness is only real when shared.
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Happiness is only real when shared.
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Paul Graham on vague philosophy
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Philosophy doesn't have a subject matter in the way math or history or most other university subject do. There is no core or knowledge one must master. The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various individual philosophers have said about different topics over the years.
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Paul Graham on charlatan teachers
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If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intelectually ambitious students.
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Paul Graham on literary theorists
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...sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people who used to do literary criticism have been edging Kantward under new names like "literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling ambitious, plain "theory."
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Donald Knuth on literate programming
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Programming is not telling a computer how to do something, but telling a person how they would instruct a computer to do something.
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Quote from Design Patterns about being pragmatic
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A desire to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic. This involves a willingness to trade off theoretical purity or future perfection in favor of getting things done today.
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Quote about the avoiding self-indulgence
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With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types and the worst thing is, they're not even fun.
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Alexander Pope on Education
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A little learning is a dnagerous thing.
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Geofrey Chaucer on Craft
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The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
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Peter Norvig on why you shouldn't learn Java or C++ first
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Programming languages such as C++ and Java are designed for professional development by large teams of experienced programmers who are concerned about the run time efficiency of their code. As a result, these languages have complicated parts designed for these circumstances. You're concerned with learning to program. You don't need that complication. You want a language that was designed to be easy to learn adn remember by a single new programmer.
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lan J Perlis on fun in computing
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I think it's extraordinarily important that we keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every once in a while and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house.
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Paul Graham on philosophy in school
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Philosophy talks, among other things, about our obligations to one another, but you can learn more about this from a wise grandmother or EB White than from an academic philosopher.
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Paul Graham on working on hard problems
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Working on hard problems is not, by itself, enough. Medieval alchemists were working on a hard problem, but their approach was so bogus that there was little to learn from studying it.
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Arthur C Clark on science and magic
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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Kathleen Winsor on Genius
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The only genius that's worth anything is the genius for hard work.
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Gore Vidal on our deepest wishes
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...I am confident, none of our deepest wishes or deeds is, finally, when honestly declared very wonderful or mysterious: simplicity, not complexity, is at the center of our being... -Messiah, 1954
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Guy Steele on not being specific in your wishes
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I want this address book sorted, so the computer throws away everything except the first entry. Now it's sorted. Or wishing to be the richest man in town and then you get no richer everyone else is poorer. Seibel responds: So the lesson from fairy tales is that the Gandalfs of the world got there by hard labor, learning the incantations, and there's no shortcut to that.
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Fred Brooks on hustle
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It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary.
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Paul Graham on vague language outside of math
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Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. Concepts we use every day break down when pushed too far, even a concept as dear to us as 'I'.
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Ableson and Sussman on abstraction
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We control complexity by building abstractions that hide details when appropriate.
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Joseph Conrad
Lord Jim 1900 Crepuscular |
The whisper of his conviction seemed to open before me a vast and uncertain expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on a plain at dawn--or was it, perchance, at the coming of the night?
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Arthur Krysal
The Shrinking World of Ideas The Chronicle of Higher Education November 21, 2014 |
Particle and quantum physics receive their due, but the ideas associated with them are so mathematically recondite taht any general discussion is somewhat beside the point.
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Terry Southern
Collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove (helped making it more absurd) |
The imporant thing in writing is the capacity to astonish.
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Edsger W. Djikstra on planning for today
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The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our past experience.
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Edsger W. Djikstra on freeing your mind
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Coping with radical novelty reqquires an orthogonal method. One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelesssly inadequate. One has, with initially a kind of split personality, to come to grips with a radical novelty as a dissociated topic in its own right.
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Edsger W. Djikstra on coming to grips with a radical novelty
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Coming to grips with a radical novelty amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that can not be translated into one's mother tongue. (Any one who has learned quantum mechanics knows what I am talking about.) Needless to say, adjusting to radical novelties is not a very popular activity, for it requires hard work.
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M. A. Shee
Elements of Art The Quarterly Review, 1810 |
We fear that it has deceived many an unwary youth, and seduced him from the more useful occupations of life, where his humble talents might have been serviceably employed, to the hopeless pursuit of an ignis fatuus, which constantly eludes his grasp, and will finally conduct him to indigence and despair.
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Nawal El-Saadwi
Egyptian feminist writer and physician |
Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.
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Evelyn Waugh
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Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.
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Donald Knuth on helping authors publish their work (through TeX)
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And it happens all the time that I see books that I know wouldn't have been written if the authors had had to go through channels the way they used to. It's again a little bit of the black-box thing.
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