We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.

Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.

It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.

... the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. ... If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.

When you write a program, think of it primarily as a work of literature. You're trying to write something that human beings are going to read. Don't think of it primarily as something a computer is going to follow. The more effective you are at making your program readable, the more effective it's going to be: You'll understand it today, you'll understand it next week, and your successors who are going to maintain and modify it will understand it.