There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.

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.

In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

Mathematics is as old as Man.

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.

Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.

What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

I read one or two other books which gave me a background in mathematics other than logic.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

How is an error possible in mathematics?

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.

I could never accept findings based almost exclusively on mathematics. It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.