Donald Knuth's Quotes

The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.

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

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.

I'm obsessively detail-oriented.

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

There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.

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.

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.

A list is only as strong as its weakest link.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

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

I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.

The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.

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 graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.

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.

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

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.

The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.