Quotes by Donald Knuth

“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.”

“People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.”

“I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.”

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

“I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and g...”

“Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into 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 huma...”

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.”

“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 uninterrupti...”

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

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

“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 ti...”