Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
Interpretation
Everyday life can be appreciated and enhanced through a passionate perspective.
Donald Knuth compares everyday life to programming, suggesting that just as a programmer can infuse their code with creativity and elegance, individuals can also enhance their daily routines and interactions with beauty if they approach them with love and passion. This analogy highlights the importance of bringing a creative mindset to all aspects of life.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a motivational speech to encourage creativity in work.
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
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.
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
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.
To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!
I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.
Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.
All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.
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