Sayings and et cetera that I’ve collected over some years.
My mother! when I learn’d that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?
Hover’d thy spirit o’er thy sorrowing son,
Wretch even then, life’s journey just begun?
Perhaps thou gavest me, though unfelt, a kiss;
Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss—
Ah, that maternal smile! it answers—Yes.
I heard the bell toll’d on thy burial day,
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away,
And, turning from my nursery-window, drew
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu!
But was it such?—It was. Where thou art gone,
Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown.
— William Cowper, “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture Out of Norfolk”
The most common way to get usability wrong is to listen to what users say rather than actually watching what they do. Requirement specifications are always wrong.
— Jakob Nielsen
I’m a Windows user. When I have a problem, I buy software.
— Jeff Atwood
In this world’s history, great things are not accomplished but by great sacrifices.
— Anthony Norris Groves
The difference between a hacker and consumer is a consumer says, “I wish it would work this way.” A hacker says, “I’ve got a screwdriver and a few minutes.”
— Rael Dornfest
I am not a follower of fashion. I prefer to think that fashion is a follower of me. In reality, what happens is that fashion goes in cycles while I remain stationary. Once per cycle, roughly every 15 years, I come briefly into fashion and then pass out again, in much the same way that a clock that has stopped is right twice a day.
— Chris Brown
God’s timing is always perfect. Why [does the] money not come a few days sooner or later? Because the Lord wanted to help us by it, and He influenced the donor just then, not sooner or later, to send it. Surely, all who know the Lord must see His hand in this work. I do not mean to say that it would be acting against the precepts of the Lord to seek for help in His work by personal and individual requests to believers. But I operate the ministry this way for the benefit of the Church at large. I cheerfully bear the trials and the precious joys of this life of faith if at least some of my fellow believers might see that a child of God does have power with Him by prayer and faith.
— George Müller
It’s no use trying to do something that somebody else has done as well as it can be done. Do something different.
— Ezra Pound, to T. S. Eliot
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
— Henry Brook Adams
The greatest experience of wisdom is often found in the absence of words.
— Michael Card (notes on “Meditation #4 Selah”)
If we had a woman with us, we could safely leave the matter in her hands; as it is, we must blunder on, as best we may.
— Squire Linthorne to Sergeant Wilkes (G. A. Henty, With Wolfe in Canada)
When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said — it makes all the difference.
— E. B. White
Most men, I believe, think of themselves as average-looking. Men will think this even if their faces cause heart failure in cattle at a range of 300 yards. Being average does not bother them; average is fine for men. This is why men never ask anybody how they look. Their primary form of beauty care is to shave themselves, which is essentially the same form of beauty care that they give to their lawns. If, at the end of his four-minute daily beauty regimen, a man has managed to wipe most of the shaving cream out of his hair and is not bleeding too badly, he feels that he has done all he can, so he stops thinking about his appearance and devotes his mind to more critical issues, such as the Super Bowl.
— Dave Barry
Any time I have to touch the mouse, I feel inefficient.
— Rands (Michael Lopp)
Writing doesn’t actually take that long. It’s the long stretches of procrastinating that take up most of your time.
— Mark Pilgrim
If we say that naturalistic evolution is science, and supernatural creation is religion, the effect is not very different from saying that the former is true and the latter is fantasy. When the doctrines of science are taught as fact, then whatever those doctrines exclude cannot be true. By the use of labels, objections to naturalistic evolution can be dismissed without a fair hearing.
— Phillip Johnson, Darwin On Trial
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
— Samuel Johnson
Time is just always going by you, and you’ll never be able to grasp it. Right now as I’m thinking of the next word to write down, time is rapidly going by. Wait, let me demonstrate: [short pause]. During that short pause I did absolutely nothing. But time, on the other hand, still went by as if I was doing something. So by not doing anything, I wasted that time. And it’s too late, there’s no way I will ever be able to get that time back.
— Doug Palermo
Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.
— Cornelius Hunter
It’s not always admin’s job to remind us to act like grown-ups or coherent humans (although as [harmonica] players we’re border line on both counts from the get-go).
— David Brown (on the Harp-L mailing list)
Sometimes I think of Abraham
How one star he saw had been lit for me
He was a stranger in this land
And I am that, no less than he
And on this road to righteousness,
Sometimes the climb can be so steep
I may falter in my steps
But never beyond Your reach
— Rich Mullins, “Sometimes By Step”
We came to the forks of the road. Here we found many placards, the most of which advised their friends to take the right fork. The left was but little traveled in comparison… and we took it.
— Wakeman Bryarly, The Overland Journal (August 12, 1849)
A sneer is not an argument.
— Jay Richards
When one’s flesh and bones are full of aches and pains, it is as natural for us to murmur as for a horse to shake his head when the flies tease him, or a wheel to rattle when a spoke is loose. But nature is not to be the rule with Christians, or what is their religion worth?
— Charles Spurgeon
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
— Blaise Pascal
I can almost hear the objection: “Sure, it’s a computer book, and he’s trying to get me to think like a computer.” Not at all. Computers think like us. We designed them; how else could they think? No, what I’m trying to do is get you to take a long, hard look at how you think. We run on automatic for so much of our lives that we literally do most of our thinking without really thinking about it.
— Jeff Duntemann, Assembly Language: Step-by-Step
When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, God was not expanding the Wikipedia entry for world religions. Following Christ is not a preference. Christianity is not a lifestyle choice.
— Alan Root
Ah, but we die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
— T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
The most intimate knowledge of God is possible on one condition—that we search His Holy Scriptures, prayerfully and habitually, and translate what we there find, into obedience.
— A. T. Pierson
I often think what a joyful interview there has been between him and some of his contemporaries who went before him. The truth of the matter is, my dear, that they are the happy ones, and that we shall never be such ourselves till we have joined the party. Can there be anything so worthy of our warmest wishes as to enter on an eternal, unchangeable state, in blessed fellowship and communion with those whose society we valued most, and for the best reasons, while they continued with us? A few steps more through a vain, foolish world, and this happiness will be yours.
— William Cowper, of his uncle Ashley Cowper, to his cousin Lady Hesketh
True virtue never appears so lovely, as when it is most oppressed.
— Jonathan Edwards
I know God’s hand when I see it, just like I know His voice when I hear it. Such is the nature of faith. Try to systematize and formalize and rationalize it, and you’ll probably kill it.
— Dr. Todd Wood
The popular music of our era… is about ever larger audiences, and hence about ever less complex ideas.
— Richard Hunter
No period within the four-and-twenty hours of day and night is so solemn to me, as the early morning. In the summer-time, I often rise very early, and repair to my room to do a day’s work before breakfast, and I am always on those occasions deeply impressed by the stillness and solitude around me. Besides that there is something awful in the being surrounded by familiar faces asleep—in the knowledge that those who are dearest to us and to whom we are dearest, are profoundly unconscious of us, in an impassive state, anticipative of that mysterious condition to which we are all tending—the stopped life, the broken threads of yesterday, the deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished but abandoned occupation, all are images of Death. The tranquillity of the hour is the tranquillity of Death. The colour and the chill have the same association. Even a certain air that familiar household objects take upon them when they first emerge from the shadows of the night into the morning, of being newer, and as they used to be long ago, has its counterpart in the subsidence of the worn face of maturity or age, in death, into the old youthful look.
— Charles Dickens, The Haunted House
Blog Of My Sojourn 