Library Update: quotes archive
The Library Update is emailed each week to subscribers. Each issue contains an interesting or humourous quote. All the quotes used since 2000 are listed here. Subscribe to the Library Update.
- no.21
- "Every solution breeds new problems." - Arthur Bloch, American writer (1948 - ).
- no.20
- "Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher." - Japanese proverb.
- no.19
- "We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live." - Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754 - 1824).
- no.18
- "Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs." - Max Beerbohm, essayist, parodist, and caricaturist (1872 - 1956).
- no.17
- "Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts." - Leo Rosten, author (1908 - 1997).
- no.16
- "Only the pure in heart can make a good soup." - Ludwig van Beethoven, German composer and pianist (1770 - 1827).
- no.15
- "Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." - Laurens Van der Post, author, farmer, war hero, (British) government advisor (1906 - 1996).
- no.14
- "I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy." - J.D. Salinger, writer (1919 - 2010).
- no.13
- "There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves." - Albert Guinon, French playwright, (1863 - 1923).
- no.12
- "Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, he can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't." - Philip Greenspun, American computer scientist, educator, and early Internet entrepreneur (1963 - ).
- no.11
- "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." - Bertrand Russell, British author, mathematician, and philosopher (1872 - 1970).
- no.10
- "I entered the office and tossed my hat at the coat rack. It missed, hit the heater, and instantly burst into flames. That reminded me: I had some work to do in Windows." - Lincoln Spector "The Maltese Penguin", 2002.
- no.9
- "All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer." - IBM maintenance manual (1925).
- no.8
- "Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration." - William Hazlitt, essayist (1778 - 1830).
- no.7
- "My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared." - P. J. Plauger, 'Computer Language', March 1983.
- no.6
- "No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases." - John Ruskin, art critic, art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, prominent social thinker and philanthropist (1819 - 1900).
- no.5
- "To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen." - Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist and writer (1825 - 1895).
- no.4
- "On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." - Charles Babbage, mathematician and computer scientist (1791 - 1871).
- no.3
- "There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception." - James Thurber, writer and cartoonist (1894 - 1961).
- no.2
- "When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody." - W. S. Gilbert, English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator (1836 - 1911).
- no.1
- "Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone." - Jean Jacques Rousseau, Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism (1712 - 1778).
