
“I had forgotten to fear him, from too much time spent too close.”
Source: Uprooted
"The Dalkey archive" (1964)
Source: The Dalkey Archive
“I had forgotten to fear him, from too much time spent too close.”
Source: Uprooted
Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
Variant in Knuth, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements" http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pdf. Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), pp. 261–301, §1.
Knuth refers to this as "Hoare's Dictum" 15 years later in "The Errors of Tex", Software—Practice & Experience 19:7 (July 1989), pp. 607–685. However, the attribution to C. A. R. Hoare is doubtful. http://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil/
All three of these papers are reprinted in Knuth, Literate Programming, 1992, Center for the Study of Language and Information ISBN 0937073806
Source: Computer Programming as an Art (1974), p. 671
“We spent too much damn time getting down. Now it’s time to get up.”
Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 9 “Paranoia: It Can Destroy Ya” (p. 258)
Variant: You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.
Source: Gone Girl
“With an extraordinary persistence he made and kept himself one of the few free men of our time.”
Source: Mohandas Gandhi (1971), p. 3
Context: Gandhi was a completely unofficial man. He recognized the gulf that lay between the enjoyment of freedom and the exercise of authority. When the Indian National Congress, which he had led intermittently as a movement dedicated to achieving liberation by legal and extra‑legal means, itself grasped for power and became a political party, he withdrew. With an extraordinary persistence he made and kept himself one of the few free men of our time.