Donald Knuth Quotes

In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the T_EX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.

A good technical writer, trying not to be obvious about it, but says everything twice: formally and informally. Or maybe three times.

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

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.

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

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.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

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.

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

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.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

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.

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

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.