Quotes, Wisdom and Snippets

Here's another round-up of quotes, wisdom and snippets...

On succeeding

• Whether you think you can or think you can't - you are right. [Henry Ford]
• Anything worth having is worth fighting for.
• Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. [Bill Gates]
• If you’re trying to go south and you find yourself walking north, it’s always best to turn around. “We’ve walked this far already” isn’t a good enough reason to continue heading in that direction.
• Around the time of Caesar, there was a European tribe that, when the assembly horn blew, always killed the last warrior to reach his assigned place, and no one enjoyed fighting this tribe.
• My wife would rather have a ticket for one fur coat, than a ticket that gave her two or nothing. [Warren Buffet]
• Son, you can do whatever you set your mind to. There's no shame in doing any job, the best you can hope for is that you enjoy it.
• Defender's dilema: The guard must keep watch continuously, while the prisoner only needs to escape once.
• Fall seven times, stand up eight. [Japanese proverb]
• Let a hundred flowers blossom. [Chairman Mao]
• Everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding.
• Optimism makes you plan for success, pessimism makes you plan for failure. [Tim Hastings]

On the creative process

• The first draft of anything is shit. [Hemingway]
• Easy reading is damn hard writing. [Hawthorne]
• No one has to see your failures unless you add vanity to folly and exhibit them. [Robert McKee]
• The key to great writing is to leave out the boring bits that people skip. [Elmore Leonard]

On getting things done

• A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
• Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
• Worry often gives a small things a big shadow. [Swedish proverb]
• Nothing of value comes easy.

On economics

• Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. [John Maynard Keynes]
• If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. [JP Getty]
• It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges. [John Maynard Keynes]
• OCTOBER: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February. [Mark Twain]
• Save a little money each month and at the end of the year you'll be surprised at how little you have. [Ernest Haskins]
• The safe way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket. [Frank Hubbard]

On technology

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. [Arthur C. Clarke]
• It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. [White Queen, Through the Looking-Glass]

On software development

• You can be Date Driven or Feature Driven but not both.
• Normalize until it hurts, denormalize until it works.
• I have wasted so much of my life making futile web apps that nobody really cares about. [Paras Chopra, Are you guilt of not solving the world's problems?]
• But user content usually follows the 80/20/1 rule, 80% browse, 20% interact (comment), and 1% contribute (add albums). [Dan McGrady, 7 Reasons Why My Social Music Site Never Took Off]
• Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
• Premature optimization is the root of all evil. [Knuth] ...but... Belated pessimization is the leaf of no good. [Lattanzi]
• Tesler's Law of Conservation of Complexity: You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you've reached that point, you can only shift the burden around. [Larry Tesler]
• Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience: Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

On everything else

• Everything you will ever need to know about medicine: Air goes in and out. Blood goes round and round. Oxygen is good. [from What we learn from the dying]
• Better to keep your mouth shut and appear a fool than to open it and remove all doubt [Mark Twain]
• You should not be judged by your looks, but you will.

Here are some previous quote dumps.
Enjoy!