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Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people
always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can
become great.
-- Mark Twain

C++ is like teenage sex: Everybody is talking about it all the time,
only few are really doing it.
-- unknown

Ne te mets pas de limite, la vie se chargera de la mettre a ta place.
-- Darryl AMEDON

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is
not worth knowing.
-- Alan Perlis

Let me try to get this straight: Lisp is a language for describing
algorithms. This was JohnMcCarthy's original purpose, anyway: to build
something more convenient than a Turing machine. Lisp is not about file,
socket or GUI programming - Lisp is about expressive power. (For
example, you can design multiple object systems for Lisp, in Lisp. Or
implement the now-fashionable AOP. Or do arbitrary transformations on
parsed source code.) If you don't value expressive power, Lisp ain't for
you. I, personally, would prefer Lisp to not become mainstream: this
would necessarily involve a dumbing down.
-- VladimirSlepnev

Well then. How could you possibly live without automated refactoring
tools? How else could you coordinate the caterpillar-like motions of all
Java’s identical tiny legs, its thousands of similar parts?
I’ll tell you how:
Ruby is a butterfly.
-- Stevey, Refactoring Trilogy, Part 1.

First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a
programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.
-- George Carrette

Sound methodology can empower and liberate the creative mind; it cannot inflame
or inspire the drudge.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, No Sliver Bullet.

In God I trust; I will not be afraid. What can mortal man do to me?
-- David (Psalm 56:4)

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that–lacking
zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs.
-- Robert Firth

A guideline in the process of stepwise refinement should be the
principle to decompose decisions as much as possible, to untangle
aspects which are only seemingly interdependent, and to defer those
decisions which concern details of representation as long as possible.
-- Niklaus Wirth

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what
you now have was once among the things only hoped for.
-- Greek philosopher Epicurus

But what is it good for?
-- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM,
commenting on the microchip, 1968

Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months
might as well have been written by someone else.
-- Eagleson’s Law

You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it
right, it is obvious that it is right.
-- Richard Feynman