"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."

“At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”

“Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.”

“At some point, if you're changing a really deep-seated behavior, you're going to have a moment of weakness.”

“FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.”

Source : 1983 Turing Award Lecture, "Communications of the ACM" 27 (8), (pp. 761-763), August 1984.

“Do not ask me to be kind; just ask me to act as though I were.”

“I have a string of competitiveness in me. It's really strange 'cause it's not something that I would even expect myself to have, but every now and then it kinda sneaks out, you know.”

“The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities.”

Source : Thorstein Veblen (2016). “THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS: An Economic Study of American Institutions and a Social Critique of Conspicuous Consumption: Development of Institutions That Shape Society and Influence the Livelihood of Citizens: Based on Sociological & Economical Theories of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer”, p.48, e-artnow

“[On Archimedes mathematical results:] It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanation... No investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen you immediately believe you would have discovered it.”