Humility

I particularly like this quote, as I think it encapsulates the most important lesson I learned (and hope to remember in future study) this past spring in my assembly programming class:

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, from his paper "The Humble Programmer", delivered at the 1972 Turing Award Lecture hosted by the ACM.