Quotes by Donald Knuth

“If you find that youre spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that youre spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.”

“God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.”

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

“Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”

“Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.”

“If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.”

“An algorithm must be seen to be believed.”

“I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of ones contributions to computer science.”

“A list is only as strong as its weakest link.”

“The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.”

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of ones contributions to computer science.

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.

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