Michael Feathers, author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code

I could list all of the qualities that I notice in
clean code, but there is one overarching quality
that leads to all of them. Clean code always
looks like it was written by someone who cares.
There is nothing obvious that you can do to
make it better. All of those things were thought
about by the code’s author, and if you try to
imagine improvements, you’re led back to
where you are, sitting in appreciation of the
code someone left for you—code left by someone
who cares deeply about the craft.