Pithy Quotes

"Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue"
-- James Hilton, Lost Horizon

"The people who bind themselves to systems are those who are unable to encompass the whole truth and try to catch it by the tail; a system is like the tail of truth, but truth is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling."
-- Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

"Sometimes we are confronted with more data than we can really use, and it may be wisest to forget and to destroy most of it"
-- Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming

"Concepts are delicious snacks with which we try to alleviate our amazement"
-- A. J. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone

"There are reasons for this too, and reasons for the reasons; there always are."
-- Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder"

"For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available superiority over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base."
-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement."
-- Alfred Adler

"Just take the ball and throw it where you want to. Throw strikes. Home plate don't move."
-- Satchel Paige

Click here for Julio Cortázar on The Preservation of Memories

Click here for Herman Melville on Art

Points of Interest

• ACM-SIGMOD home page
• Database and Logic Programming bibliography server
• Berkeley DBMS Home Page
• WNUR-FM Jazz Information Server
• Hellerstein music page
• Eric Dolphy page