Donald Knuth

"Programming is really nothing more and nothing less than the process of taking care of all the details."

"Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope."

"The most important principle is to be honest in your dealings with others."

"Coding is easy; the hard part is thinking."

"Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before."

"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."

"If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines produced but as lines spent."

"I believe that the time investment in learning TeX has been repaid as soon as you've learned the language itself."

"Teaching is one way to learn things deeply."

"When in doubt, try something simple."

"Character and integrity are not negotiable."

"One of the most important principles for the good system designer is to recognize that he or she does not know everything."

"The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work."

"Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back."

"I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof."

"A picture is worth 10K words; but a picture is only worth 1K words if it's hard to understand."

"There is no royal road to anything - not even to geometry."

"The most important question for a programmer is: does it work?"

"Science and art have much in common; both require imagination and discipline."

"If you think I'm wasting my time, then I'm sorry to hear it."

"The purpose of typographical design is to communicate, not to decorate."

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."

"The greater the distance between theory and practice, the greater the chance of success."

"I would rather have a code of one line of gold than a code of a thousand lines of lead."

"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. That is why I enjoy them."

"The real problem is that most people don't think carefully about what they're doing."

"If you are unable to state a problem in a few sentences, you do not understand it yet."

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

"I think that the most important thing is to be curious."

"Aha! responses are what programming is all about."