So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.

Trouble no one about their religion;
     respect others in their view,
     and demand that they respect yours.

Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.

Seek to make your life long
     and its purpose in the service of your people.

Prepare a noble death song
     for the day when you go over the great divide.

Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing
     a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place.

Show respect to all people and grovel to none.

When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food
    and for the joy of living;
     if you see no reason for giving thanks,
     the fault lies only in yourself.

Abuse no one and no thing,
     for abuse turns the wise ones to fools
     and robs the spirit of its vision.

When it comes your time to die,
     be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear
     of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray
     for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different
     way; sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation

1768 - 1813

It was a hot night, sweet with the death of summer and the hint and promise of fall. A waiting night, a night marking time, the end of a season. The stars were bright, close to me, and the North Star hung over the trees... The town and the university and the friends I had there flooded through my mind... All the girls young and lovely... But most of them had gone their ways. Gone as I'd gone mine. I looked up at the sky and whistled “Stardust.”

Hoagy Carmichael

From The Stardust Road, by Hoagy Carmichael, describing how the song “Stardust” came to be.

There are six essentials in painting:

     the first is called spirit;

     the second, rhythm;

     the third, thought;

     the fourth, scenery;

     the fifth, the brush;

     and the last is the ink.

Ching Hao

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Carl Sagan

Excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. These comments were inspired by an image taken from Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. It was Dr. Sagan's idea to turn Voyager's camera back towards Earth in order to take this picture.. "As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 4 billion miles away when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent of only 0.12 pixels in size. Image: JPL/NASA" (Quoted from "The Planetary Society" website: www.planetary.org).

The person who really wants to do a thing finds a way.
The other person finds an excuse.

Anonymous

You know you've achieved perfection in design,
not when you have nothing more to add,
but when you have nothing more to take away.

Antoine de St. Exupery

There are two ways of constructing a software design:

One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

The first method is far more difficult.

C. A. R. Hoare

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: data sets, relationships among data items, algorithms, and invocations of functions. This essence is abstract in that such a conceptual construct is the same under many different representations. It is nonetheless highly precise and richly detailed.

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.

If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering

Computer Magazine, April 1987

It is no use saying “We are doing our best.”
You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

Sir Winston Churchill