Donald Knuth

The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

Good programmers know what to write. Great programmers know what to rewrite.

You should measure the time it takes to execute your algorithms.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

A programming language is a tool for expressing ideas.

It is better to have an approximate answer to the right problem than an exact answer to the wrong problem.

The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times.