One of my favorite parts of a good book or dissertation is reading the quotes at the beginning of a chapter. I recently read the dissertation of Alexander Refsum Jensenius, and it has some great quotes. Here are a few of my favorites:

It is easy to play any musical instru- ment: all you have to do is to push the right keys at the right time and then the instrument will play itself.
J.S. Bach

If you take a photograph of some- thing [...] you separate it from the rest of the world and you say, “This deserves special attention”.
Brian Eno (Kalbacher, 1982)

Computers have promised us a fountain of wisdom but deliv- ered a flood of data.
(Frawley et al., 1992, 57)

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
Pablo Picasso

Technology at present is covert philosophy; the point is to make it openly philosophical.
(Agre, 1997, 240)

If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?

Somehow it reminded me of another quote that I like a lot. When Einstein was asked to describe how radio works, this was his answer:

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.