Words of wisdom that I appreciate:

“He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.”
-- George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.  Code for readability."
-- John F. Woods, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.c++/rYCO5yn4lXw/oITtSkZOtoUJ 

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."
-- Voltaire, Letter to Prince Frederick William of Prussia (28 November 1770)

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the suptid ones are full of confidence."
-- Charles Bukowski

"All generalizations are dangerous, even this one."
-- Alexandre Dumas

"The more you learn, the more you earn."
-- Warren Buffet

"Obsessed is a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated."
-- Zyzz

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."
-- David Wheeler

"I'm 56 years old. I can't blame anybody for anything I do."
-- Max Cherry

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
-- Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving."
-- Albert Camus

"We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code."
-- David D. Clark

"You can't manage what you don't measure."
-- Peter Drucker

"Pressure is a privilege."
-- Billie Jean King

"As the husband is, so the wife is. She is married to a clown, and the grossness of his nature drags her down."
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Locksley Hall - 1842)

"If you think cryptography can solve your problem, you don’t understand your problem and you don’t understand cryptography."
-- Roger Needham