Update (2011-02-03): I'm going to start tracking new quotes by the date in which I find them, because I think that'll be useful later on to re-discover how I, my opinions and my thought processes "evolved" through time, which in the end is one of the main purposes of this blog.
2012-11-14
"Cuanto más pienso en ello, más reacio soy a hablar de mí mismo (si es que realmente hay necesidad de hacerlo). Antes prefiero conocer, en mayor o menor medida, hechos objetivos sobre existencias ajenas. Y, basándome en la posición que ocupan tales hechos y personajes individuales en mi interior, o a través del modo en que restablezco mi sentido del equilibrio incluyéndolos, trato de conocerme de la manera más objetiva posible." - narrador, en "Sputnik, Mi Amor", de Haruki Murakami
2012-11-13
"In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a... collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing." - Elon Musk2012-11-10
"[A] person becomes old when his mind is more occupied by memories than aspirations." - Navin Kulkarni, here.2012-10-26
"Worse, understanding is hardly an on/off switch. It’s like layers of an onion, from very superficial insights to the deep understandings that underpin scientific revolutions. Peeling that onion is often a poorly understood process." - Scott Young, here" 'Premature optimization is the root of all evil.' – a very abused maxim, and I’ve written about it before. A corollary to that might be [...] 'Understanding what is and isn’t “premature” is what separates senior engineers from junior engineers.' " - paraphrased by John Allspaw, here
2012-09-19
"About the only metric I'd accept as a reasonable measure of the 'value' of a person is 'How much suffering have they wilfully caused?' " - "ncoghlan_dev", here2012-07-14
"Complex systems are necessarily fault-tolerant. If they weren’t fault tolerant, they likely wouldn’t survive long enough to become complex. Unfortunately, *the down side is that fault-tolerant systems are always faulty.*[...]
Some systems must be complex and fault-tolerant. But when we decide to make something fault-tolerant, especially if there is a realistic alternative to make it simpler, we should be aware of the consequences." - John D. Cook (here)
"Taking over a software project is like taking over a novel. Editing to fix typos and grammatical errors in a completed novel is relatively easy. Taking over a half-finished manuscript is much harder. It might be easier to throw away the manuscript and write your own novel from scratch." - John D. Cook (here)
2012-03-18
"[...] y Jean-Marc recordó su vieja teoría: hay tres tipos de aburrimiento: el aburrimiento pasivo: la chica que baila y bosteza; el aburrimiento activo: los aficionados a las cometas; y el aburrimiento rebelde: la juventud que quema coches y rompe escaparates." - Narrador de "La identidad", de Milan Kundera"Porque aquellos que se resisten a los placeres organizados son desertores de la gran lucha común contra el aburrimiento y no merecen ni atención ni casco." - Narrador de "La identidad", de Milan Kundera
"En aquel momento comprendí el único sentido de la amistad tal como se practica hoy. La amistad le es indispensable al hombre para el buen funcionamiento de su memoria. Recordar el propio pasado, llevarlo siempre consigo, es tal vez la condición necesaria para conservar, como suele decirse, la integridad del propio yo. Par que el yo no se encoja, para que conserver su volumne, hay que regar los recuerdos como a las flores y, para regarlos, hay que mantener regularmente el contacto con los testigos del pasado, es decir, con los amigos." - Jean-Marc, en "La identidad", de Milan Kundera
2012-01-14
"La razón me dijo que era demasiado pronto para urdir planes. Además, en ningún momento había tenido mucho interés en la venganza. Vengarse es el objetivo de aquellos que se sienten de algún modo derrotados. Yo no estaba derrotado, me dije. No; no estaba vencido. Y siempre es mucho más interesante pensar en la victoria que en la venganza." - Lestat de Lioncourt (en El Ladrón de Cuerpos, cap. 19)
2011-11-27
"A algunas nos enamoran con cultura; a otras con caricias; a otras con detalles. Para todas las demás, existe MasterCard." (Miri)2011-05-11
"Amazon is simply the latest example demonstrating that people can do a good job of planning for computer errors, but computers are very poor at planning for people errors." - William Oellermann (here)"You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before, she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She's not perfect - you aren't either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don't hurt her, don't change her, don't analyze and don't expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she's not there." - Bob Marley
2011-02-03
"Seek the company of those who are looking for the truth, and run away from those who have found it" - Vaclav Havel (quoted by Deepak Chopra in this very long but very interesting video)"People have been comparing software components to LEGO blocks for a couple decades. We should be able to assemble applications by snapping together modular components, just like LEGOs. There has been progress, but for the most part we haven’t realized the promise LEGO-style software development.
Integrating two software systems is usually more like performing a heart transplant than snapping together LEGO blocks. It can be done — if there’s a close enough match and the people doing it have enough skill — but the pieces don’t fit together trivially. And failure may not be immediately obvious; it may take a while to see signs of rejection." - John D. Cook (in his blog The Endeavour)
Not calendarized
"Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant." - Jorge Luis Borges
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein
"Oh, I have compromised my principles a few times," he conceded unapologetically.
"You can only compromise your principles once," she replied. "After then you don't have any."
"Learning things was like trying to count the stars: there were always two more for every one she counted." - (from the story Silver Shoes for a Princess, by James P. Hogan)
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something." - Plato
"It's good to shut up sometimes." - Marcel Marceau
"A magician makes the visible invisible. A mime makes the invisible visible." - Marcel Marceau
"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"There is nothing that puts a man more in your debt than that he owes you nothing." - Mark Caine
"I suppose I do have one unembarrased passion... I wanna know what it feels like to care about something passionately." - Susan Orlean (from the movie Adaptation)
"People like to call this 'thinking outside of the box' which is the wrong way to look at it. Just like Neo needed to understand that 'there is no spoon' in the film The Matrix, you need to realize 'there is no box' to step outside of." - Brian Clark
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Dennis Gabor
"...the average Vogon will not think twice before doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been born - or (if you are a clearer minded thinker) that the Vogon had never been born" - (from the book The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, by Douglas Adams)
"La vida se le fue tan rápido que pareció durar lo mismo que una fusa: era sólo un instante, pero la nota no era menos importante o hermosa; sólo era más difícil de apreciar" - Champi
"I'd rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are;
because a could be is a maybe who is reaching for a star.
I'd rather be a has-been than a might have been, by far;
for a might have-been has never been, but a has was once an are." - Milton Berle
"But life is not a succession of urgent 'now's. It is a listless trickle of 'why should I's." - Rochester (from the movie The Libertine)
"Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while." - Anonymous
"We should not only use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow." - Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"War doesn't determine who's right - only who's left." - Bertrand Russel
"Laws are like cobwebs, for if any trifling or powerless thing falls into them, they hold it fast, but if a thing of any size falls into them it breaks the mesh and escapes" - Anacharsis (C.600 B.C.)
"Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends, and astronomy begins." - Christopher Hitchens
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi*z*z*a.
"Religion is for people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there." - ??? (parece ser de Running Hawk - Lakota nation (Pine ridge))
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” - Oscar Wilde
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg
"A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition." - José Bergamín
"A man always has two reasons for the things he does – a good one and the real one" - John Pierpont Morgan
"If in his published writings he aimed for maximum precision and minimum controversy, stripping down his contributions until only the bones were left... in his notebooks and in his conversations with Wang, he felt free to engage in the most wide-ranging, fundamental speculations, flying through thin air as high as pure thought could take him, with no fear of crashing since he had no intention of landing." - Palle Yourgrau, talking about Kurt Gödel
"Imagine that one day, one of your users (a driver) decides to drive off the bridge. In civil engineering, it isn't your fault, it's his. In Software, it is your fault. You would have to have thought about a way of preventing that. Thats akin to saying that when a driver is about to drive off a bridge, a huge rubber wall should instantly appear bouncing him into the bridge again. This wall should have the message 'The operation you tried to do is not allowed'." - Peter Norvig
"Mathematicians work in a store that makes and sells tools. Occasionally they take special orders from their scientific customers, but most of the day they toil away making elegant tools, the uses for which have not yet been invented. Scientists visit this tool shop and browse the shelves in hopes that one of the tools fits their needs." - From Euler's Gem, by David S. Richeson, p.201
"The first law of thermodynamics insists that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The second law replies, Fine, then I'll have to settle for breaking its knees." - de The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, de Natalie Angier (que por cierto, fuera de esa frase, no recomiendo mucho).
"I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something - or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip." - de Prince of Chaos, de Roger Zelazny.
"To do things that are very difficult or «impossible»,
First you have to not run away. That takes seconds.
Then you have to work. That takes hours.
Then you have to stick at it. That takes years." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
"The phrase «making money» is a triumph in itself over previous models of wealth as something to steal." - cited by Eliezer Yudkowsky in the blog Overcoming Bias.
"I have the feeling that one of the most important aspects of any computing tool is its influence on the thinking habits of those that try to use it." - Edgar Dijkstra, en The Humble Programmer.
À la femme de mes rêves, the eternal muse, and the search for inexpressible beauty. - Gregory Chaitin, dedicatoria de "Meta Math: The Quest for Omega"
"Those who have witnessed the deep truths of mathematics", Bell wrote, "have experienced something no jellyfish has ever felt." - E.T. Bell (I think?), mathematician
"I mean, code is not like descriptive prose you’d put in a local wiki. You can’t read it, say 'I get it!', update it, and make the author happy with the 'refactoring'. Code is more like poetry: change this line, and now the next line doesn’t rhyme, or you’ve broken the rhythm, or you’ve put angry words into a happy poem, that sort of trouble. Which is one reason to like code ownership." - Yossi Kreinin (http://www.yosefk.com/blog/extreme-programming-explained.html)
"Le parecía tan bella, tan seductora, tan distinta de la gente común, que no entendía por qué nadie se trastornaba como él con las castañuelas de sus tacones en los adoquines de la calle, ni se le desordenaba el corazón con el aire de los suspiros de sus volantes, ni se volvía loco de amor todo el mundo con los vientos de su trenza, el vuelo de sus manos, el oro de su risa." - de El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera, de Gabriel García Márquez.
"Se puso a la media noche su traje de domingo, y tocó a solas bajo el balcón de Fermina Daza el valse de amor que había compuesto para ella, que sólo ellos dos conocían, y que fue durante tres años el emblema de su complicidad contrariada. Lo tocó murmurando al letra, con el violín bañado en lágrimas, y con una inspiración tan intensa que a los primeros compases empezaron a ladrar los perros de la calle, y luego los de la ciudad, pero después se fueron callando poco a poco por el hechizo de la música, y el valse terminó con un silencio sobrenatural." - de El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera, de Gabriel García Márquez.
"Con ella aprendió Florentino Ariza lo que ya había padecido muchas veces sin saberlo: que se puede estar enamorado de varias personas a la vez, y de todas con el mismo dolor, sin traicionar a ninguna. Solitario entre la muchedumbre del muelle, se había dicho con un golpe de rabia: «El corazón tiene más cuartos que un hotel de putas»." - de El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera, de Gabriel García Márquez.
"Mientras las personas son jóvenes y la composición musical de su vida está aún en sus primeros compases, pueden escribirla juntas e intercambiarse motivos (tal como Tomás y Sabina se intercambiaron el motivo del sombrero hongo), pero cuando se encuentra y son ya mayores, sus composiciones musicales están ya más o menos cerradas y cada palabra, cada objeto, significa una cosa distinta en la composición de la una y en la de la otra." - de La Insoportable Levedad del Ser, de Milan Kundera.
"Dans les langues qui forment le mot compassion non pas avec la racine «passio - souffrance» mais avec le substantif «sentiment», le mot est employé à peu près le même sens, mais on peut difficilement dire qu'il désigne un sentiment mauvais ou médiocre. La force secrète de son étymologie baigne le mot d'une autre lumière et lui donne un sens plus large: avoir de la compassion (co-sentiment), c'est pouvoir vivre avec l'autre son malheur mais aussi senti avec lui n'importe quel autre sentiment: la joie, l'angoisse, le bonheur, la douleur. Cette compassion-là (au sens de soucit, wspolczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) désigne donc la plus haute capacité d'imagination affective, l'art de la télépathie des émotions. Dans la hiérarchie des sentiments, c'est le sentiment suprême." - de L'Insoutenable Légèreté de l'Être (La Insoportable Levedad del Ser), de Milan Kundera.
"Comme je l'ai déjà dit, les personnages ne naissent pas d'un corps maternel, comme naissent les êtres vivants, mais d'une situation, d'une phrase, d'une métaphore qui contient en germe une possibilité humaine fondamentale dont l'auteur s'imagine qu'elle n'a pas encore été découverte ou qu'on n'en a encore rien dit d'essentiel." - de L'Insoutenable Légèreté de l'Être (La Insoportable Levedad del Ser), de Milan Kundera.
"Porque la añoranza no intensifica la actividad de la memoria, no sucita recuerdos, se basta a sí misma, a su propia emoción, absorbida como está por su propio sufrimiento." - de La Ignorancia, de Milan Kundera.
"Durante 20 años no había pensado en otra cosa que en regresar. Pero, una vez de vuelta, comprendió sorprendido que su vida, la esencia misma de su vida, su centro, su tesoro, se encontraba fuera de Ítaca, en sus veinte años de andanzas por el mundo." - de La Ignorancia, de Milan Kundera.
"Este es otro enigma de la memoria: ¿puede medirse el volumen temporal de los recuerdos?" - de La Ignorancia, de Milan Kundera.
styska se mi po tobe (checo) "Te añoro, ya no puedo soportar el dolor de tu ausencia" - de La Ignorancia, de Milan Kundera.
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