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)

And of course, I love the Albert Einstein quote at the very beginning of the dissertation:
bq. 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.