I have always had a strong interest in knowing great people in my field i.e., programming. Knowing about them, following them, and reading them not only gives you immense knowledge but the motivation you need to excel in what you are doing. 

It's motivation, not the knowledge that will propel your career. Knowledge is useless without motivation because knowing is not enough, you need to apply that knowledge, and without motivation, you just can't do that. There are times when the programmers also felt tired and bored. These are the times when you spent hours constantly looking at the computer screen, clicking here and there, surfing the net without doing anything. 

That's the total waste of time and it's the result of poor motivation. If you are motivated then you will constantly work towards improving your code, writing more unit tests, creating better documentation, and spending some time retrospecting, how could you have done better.

One of the key elements of Agile which often gets overlooked is highly motivated developers, without that Agile will not be Agile.  So, how do you motivate yourself? well, there are many ways e.g., attending seminars, looking at what your colleagues are doing, listening to great developers and successful entrepreneurs, reading programming stories or stories about programmers, or reading something which is fun like these entertaining posts from StackOverflow, and last but not the least, reading quotes from the great programmers?

This thought motivated me to share some timeless quotes from great authors and programmers who has immense contribution to the Java community. This includes Uncle Bob, Joshua Bloch, Brian Goetz, Kent Beck, and James Gosling. Quotes are not just a source of motivation but also a source of wisdom. Not all quotes are motivational, some of them are wisdom and advice.

20 Timeless Quotes from My Favorite Authors

Be ready to motivate yourself, here you go!

1. “It is not enough for code to work.” ― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.

2. “I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.” ― Kent Beck.

3. “Truth can only be found in one place: the code.” ― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.

4. “We want to get engineers to think about something else.” ― James Gosling, Creator of Java Programming language.

5. “Responsibility cannot be assigned; it can only be accepted. If someone tries to give you responsibility, only you can decide if you are responsible or if you aren't.” ― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change.

6. “It is far easier to design a class to be thread-safe than to retrofit it for thread safety later.” ― Brian Goetz, Java Concurrency in Practice.

7. “What would happen if you allowed a bug to slip through a module, and it cost your company $10,000? The nonprofessional would shrug his shoulders, say “stuff happens,” and start writing the next module. The professional would write the company a check for $10,000!” ― Robert C. Martin, The Clean Coder.

8. “Slaves are not allowed to say no. Laborers may be hesitant to say no. But professionals are expected to say no. Indeed, good managers crave someone who has the guts to say no. It’s the only way you can really get anything done.” ― Robert C. Martin, The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers.

9. “Locking can guarantee both visibility and atomicity; volatile variables can only guarantee visibility.” ― Brian Goetz, Java Concurrency in Practice.

10. “One advantage of static factory methods is that, unlike constructors, they have names.” ― Joshua Bloch, Effective Java Programming Language Guide.

11. “Redundant comments are just places to collect lies and misinformation.” ― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.

12. “Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work” ― Kent Beck.

13. “Duplication is the primary enemy of a well-designed system.” ― Robert C. Martin, The Robert C. Martin Clean Code Collection (Collection).

14. “Just as it is a good practice to make all fields private unless they need greater visibility, it is a good practice to make all fields final unless they need to be mutable.” ― Brian Goetz, Java Concurrency in Practice.

15. “A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment.” ― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.

16. “The ratio of time spent reading (code) versus writing is well over 10 to 1 ... (therefore) making it easy to read makes it easier to write.” ― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.

That's all guys. I love these quotes, some of them are motivated to keep you going, some of them are plain hard truths to open your eyes, and some of them are the wisdom of these great people, acquired by years of experience in the field.

Remember:

You can only learn few things if you learn by your mistake, but there is no limit once you started learning form other's experience.

- Unknown

Cheers!