Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

I mentioned the non-competitive spirit explicitly, because these days, excellence is a fashionable concept. But excellence is a competitive notion, and that is not what we are heading for: we are heading for perfection.

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.

Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.

Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called "life", expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing.

If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me.

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.

The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called 'life', expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing.

Mathematicians are like managers they want improvement without change.

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

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

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

And I like asking questions, to keep learning; people with big egos might not want to look unsure.

The lopsided attitudes of college professors pose a serious challenge to learning because students are so susceptible to becoming lopsided sheep.

I've never stopped learning.

I know what I like when I see it, but no way have I ever become interested in learning about it.

Not being a comic book fan, being thrown into that and seeing the extreme - it's taken very seriously. So I tried to do as much learning as I could about it so I wasn't mean or anything.

I spent a lot of years just learning my craft and falling down in front of the camera.

I'm learning English at the moment. I can say 'Big Ben', 'Hello Rodney', 'Tower Bridge' and 'Loo'.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

I love talking about women because they are a constant study and you're always learning.

The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments.

I think that obstacles lead to growth and ultimately, the most learning I've done in my life is between jobs.

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music; it is about what happens when you are doing the music.