Donald Knuth Quotes

Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...

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.

Most people only know pi in decimal.

Let's face it, if there were 10 people like me in the world, we wouldn't have time to read each other's books.

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.

By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.

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

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

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.

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

The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.

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.