Quotes

A collection of some of my favorite quotes.

Life

"If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity." - Bill Vaughan

"There's no accounting for other people's tastes." - My grandma

Creativity

"The lesson? It seems you can either be free to do anything you want, to create anything you dream of without answering to anyone, or you can be rich. You're not likely to be both." - Cabel Sasser, on the death of Nullsoft

"By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist." - Robert Bringhurst

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein

"That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." - Steve Jobs

"The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal." - William James

"I don’t think games HAVE secret sauce; I think all the ingredients together, when served at the right time on the right table, make a really memorable meal." - Adam Atomic

Engineering

"Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it." -Conway's Law

"It is better to solve the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way." - Dick Hamming

"I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire. I'd personally be happy if they reinvented the wheel, because at least we'd be moving forward." - Alan Kay

"A hack is anything that has the potential to fail disastrously each time something changes expectedly." - Kroc Camen

"Vim’s wonderfulness and power is the wonderfulness and power of git, or linux, where the learning curve is steep (ridiculously steep at times), but the rewards of mastery are sublime." - Jamis Buck

"I don’t know many developers who work on highly scaled sites that haven’t angrily cussed like a sailor when the shit hits the fan." - Terry Chay

"Code wants to be simple... I had to give up the idea that I had the perfect vision of the system to which the system had to conform. Instead, I had to accept that I was only the vehicle for the system expressing its own desire for simplicity. My vision could shape initial direction, and my attention to the desires of the code could affect how quickly and how well the system found its desired shape, but the system is riding me much more than I am riding the system." - Kent Beck