Always doing what you are told doesn’t mean you’ll succeed in life

any decent answer to an interesting question begins, “it depends…”

The most important thing we ever learn at school is that the most important things can’t be learned at school.

This is the beauty of cycling - the rhythm puts serious activity in the brain to sleep: it creates a void. Random thoughts enter that void - the chorus from a song, a verse of poetry, a detail in the countryside, a joke, the answer to something that vexed me long ago.

So often the case that people work best when they are stretching out over an abyss of ignorance, hanging on to a thin branch of ‘what is still possible’, tantalised by the future

I always feel I’m not getting enough out of life. This lovely weather - and I didn’t use it. I should recognize that sitting in Hyde Park is as useful as sitting in front of a computer

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.

Politicians like passing laws and regulations because this makes them look as though they’re doing something

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. … we computer experts barely know what we are doing. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.