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.

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 must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

Obedience to the word in humility of mind never confuses.

The people who abandon Jihad fall a victim to humility and degradation.

Humility is not my forte, and whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

Humility is the solid foundation of all virtues.

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.

When someone saves your life and gives you life, there's gratitude, humility; there's a time you've been so blessed you realize you've been given another chance at life that maybe you did or didn't deserve.

The beloved of the Almighty are: the rich who have the humility of the poor, and the poor who have the magnanimity of the rich.

Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic and cruel.

Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.

But when one believes that you've been appointed by God for a particular mission in history, you have to be very careful about that, how you speak about that. Where is the self-reflection in that? Where is the humility in that?

The greatest friend of truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility.

Too many people in government seem to think they are above regular folks, and I said I would expect humility in the way each member of my team served- that they would recognize that the taxpayer is boss.

Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.

Humility is a necessary veil to all other graces.

Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.

If I had any humility I would be perfect.

Power is dangerous unless you have humility.