When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.

Piet Hein
“T.T.T.”, from Grooks 1

[M]ost of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale. But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.

David Cain

At first they deployed a man with a stick. The groundsman approached one buzzing batch, decided his mode of attack would not work, and returned defeated.

Andrew Fidel Fernando / Cricinfo
on a cricket match delayed by bees

If I could begin to be
Half of what you think of me
I could do about anything
I could even learn how to love

Rebecca Sugar
“Love Like You”, from Steven Universe

Obviously, pianos do not sing.

Judge George H King
in Rupa Marya v. Warner Chappell Music
on the copyright of “Happy Birthday”

When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Stone Librande
on designing SimCity (2013)

Solutions to problems
are easy to find;
the problem’s a great
contribution.

What is truly an art
is to wring from your mind
a problem to fit
a solution.

Piet Hein
“Last Things First”, from Grooks 3

We have lots of different snakes. The quality of your work determines which snake you will fight. The better your thesis is, the smaller the snake will be.

Luke Burns / McSweeney’s
on defending your thesis

The trouble is that when the person at the other end of the helpline goes to check this out, very often the mouse has gone elsewhere.

The Chairman of Committees
on the mouse problem in the House of Lords