Donald Knuth Quotes

I came to philosophy finally phrased as "0.8 is enough". … If I had a way to rate happiness, I think it's a good design to have an organism that's happy about 80% of the time. If it was 100% of the time, it would be like everybody's on drugs and everything collapses and nothing works because everybody is just too happy. … There are times when I am down and I know that I've actually been programmed to be depressed a certain amount of time.

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.

In a way, you'd say my life is a convex combination of English and mathematics. ... And not only that, I want my kids to be that way: use left brain, right brain at the same time – you got a lot more done. That was part of the bargain.

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

To summarize: We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak of the state of the Art.

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.

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

The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole.

I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level.

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

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

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

The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.

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