The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. is an essay (and later a book) where every other paragraph feels like a great stand-alone quote, with real developer wisdom. To pick just one of many great paragraphs:

As soon as one freezes a design, it becomes obsolete in terms of its concepts. But implementation of real products demands phasing and quantizing. The obsolesce of an implementation must be measured against the other existing implementations, not against unrealized concepts. The challenge and the mission are to find real solutions to real problems on actual schedules with available resources.