108 Quotes by Donald Knuth

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

The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

When certain concepts of TeX are introduced informally, general rules will be stated; afterwards you will find that the rules aren't strictly true. In general, the later chapters contain more reliable information than the earlier ones do. The author feels that this technique of deliberate lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas. Once you understand a simple but false rule, it will not be hard to supplement that rule with its exceptions.

Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.

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

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.