Has everyone noticed that all the letters of the word database are typed with the left hand? Now the layout of the QWERTY typewriter keyboard was designed, among other things, to facilitate the even use of both hands. It follows, therefore, that writing about databases is not only unnatural, but a lot harder than it appears. (Anonymous)

The great successful men of the world have used their imaginations. They think ahead and create their mental picture, and then go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little, altering this bit and that bit, but steadily building, steadily building. (Robert Collier)

TABLE : An arrangement of words, numbers, or signs, or combinations of them, as in parallel columns, to exhibit a set of facts or relations in a definite, compact, and comprehensive form; a synopsis or scheme. (Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language)

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)

Pooh was sitting in his house one day, counting his pots of honey, when there came a knock on the door. “Fourteen,” said Pooh. “Come in. Fourteen. Or was it fifteen? Bother. That’s muddled me.” “Hallo, Pooh,” said Rabbit. “Hallo, Rabbit. Fourteen, wasn’t it?” “What was?” “My pots of honey what I was counting.” “Fourteen, that’s right.” “Are you sure?” “No,” said Rabbit. “Does it matter?” (A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner)

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men could not put Humpty together again. (Old nursery rhyme)

For ‘Is’ and ‘Is-Not’ though with Rule and Line, and ‘Up-and-Down’ by Logic I define, of all that one should care to fathom, I was never deep in anything but - Wine. (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Traslated by Edward Fitzgerald)

The most valuable acquisitions in a scientific or technical education are the general-purpose mental tools which remain serviceable for a life-time. (George Forsythe, “What to do till the computer scientist comes”, 1968)

Two ideas lie gleaming on the jeweler’s velvet. The first is the calculus, the second, the algorithm. The calculus and the rich body of mathematical analysis to which it gave rise made modern science possible; but it has been the algorithm that has made possible the modern world. (David Berlinski, The Advent of the Algorithm, 2000)

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you can not express it in numbers your knowledge is a meagre and unsatisfactory kind : it may be the beginning of knowledge but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be. (Lord Kelvin, 1824-1907)

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. (Albert Einstein, 1979-1955)

Science is as far removed from brute force as this sword from a crowbar. (Edward Lytton, 1803-1873, Leila, Book II, Chapter I)

Doing a thing well is often a waste of time. (Robert Byrne, master pool and billiards player and writer)

Whatever man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this - Great God, grant that twice two be not four. (Ivan Turgenev, 1818-1883, Russian novelist and short-story writer)

Plutarch says that Sertorius, in order to teach his soldiers that perseverance and wit are better than brute force, had two horses brought before them, and set two men to pull out their tails. One of the men was a burly Hercules, who tugged and tugged, but all to no purpose; the other was a sharp, weasel-faced tailor, who plucked one hair at a time, amidst roars of laughter, and soon left the tail quite bare. (E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898)

That’s the secret to life… replace one worry with another. (Charles M. Schulz, 1922-2000, American cartoonist, the creator of Peanuts)

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter less. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832)

Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless. (Max Born, 1882-1970, My Life and My Views, 1968)