Frank's Quote Page

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Francis Bacon, the Essays

I came across this quote when reading How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, and I liked it because I took it as a good reminder to not believe most of what you see online. Online, there is a constant sensationalism that tries to make you believe what often turns out to be false (or only partially true), and I took this as a good reminder to take what you read with a grain of salt.

Francis Bacon was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I. Bacon argued the importance of natural philosophy, and his works remained influential throughout the Scientific Revolution.

One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.
The Bitter Lesson, Rich Sutton

I first saw this quote reading George Hotz's blog, and I liked it because it gave me some certain idea about the future.

This quote tracks what I have seen when reading about technology in general as well; oftentimes, you see that a method of doing something related to technology was proposed 30-50 years before the thing was even created because of manufacturing limitations.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
"If—" - by Rudyard Kipling

"If—" is a poem by English poet Rudyard Kipling, written around 1895.
I was watching an episode of Boardwalk Empire when the character Eddie, while on his deathbed, started reciting the beginning of this poem and since I remembered hearing it in Apocalypse Now , I decided to look it up.
The beginning of the poem, If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, is the most popular way to reference the poem in media I think, and these first two lines really summarize the stoic theme of the poem - the reason why I like it and included it here.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly
go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out
to be impossible to get at or repair.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (1992)

I liked this quote because you can run into the trap of making a lot of assumptions when developing a software application, assumptions which can result in hard to find errors.
It is a good reminder to write code intentionally.