Beautiful is better than ugly: The philosophy behind this is to write programs for human readers, with simple expression syntax and consistent syntax and behavior for all programs.

Explicit is better than implicit: Most concepts are kept explicit, just like the explicit Boolean type. We have used an explicit literal value—true or false—for Boolean variables instead of depending on zero or nonzero integers. Still, it does support the integer-based Boolean concept. Nonzero values are treated as Boolean. Similarly, its for loop can operate data structures without managing the variable. The same loop can iterate through tuples and characters in a string.

Simple is better than complex: Memory allocation and the garbage collector manage allocation or deallocation of memory to avoid complexity. Another simplicity is introduced in the simple print statement. This avoids the use of file descriptors for simple printing. Moreover, objects automatically get converted to a printable form in comma-separated values.

Complex is better than complicated: Scientific computing concepts are complex, but this doesn't mean that the program will be complicated. Python programs are not complicated, even for very complex application. The "Pythonic" way is inherently simple, and the SciPy and NumPy packages are very good examples of this.

Flat is better than nested: Python provides a wide variety of modules in its standard library. Namespaces in Python are kept in a flat structure, so there is no need to use very long names, such as java.net.socket instead of a simple socket in Python. Python's standard library follows the batteries included philosophy. This standard library provides tools suitable for many tasks. For example, modules for various network protocols are supported for the development of rich Internet applications. Similarly, modules for graphic user interface programming, database programming, regular expressions, high-precision arithmetic, unit testing, and much more are bundled in the standard library. Some of the modules in the library include networking (socket, select, SocketServer, BaseHTTPServer, asyncore, asynchat, xmlrpclib, and SimpleXMLRPCServer), Internet protocols (urllib, httplib, ftplib, smtpd, smtplib, poplib, imaplib, and json), database (anydbm, pickle, shelve, sqlite3, and mongodb), and parallel processing (subprocess, threading, multiprocessing, and queue).

Sparse is better than dense: The Python standard library is kept shallow and the Python package index maintains an exhaustive list of third-party packages meant for supporting in-depth operations for a topic. We can use pip to install custom Python packages.

Readability counts: The block structure of your program should be created using white spaces, and Python uses minimal punctuation in its syntax. As semicolons introduce blocks, no semicolons are needed at the end of the line. Semicolons are allowed but they are not required in every line of code. Similarly, in most situations, parentheses are not required for expressions. Python introduces inline documentation used to generate API documentation. Python's documentation is available at runtime and online.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules: The philosophy behind this is that everything in Python is an object. All built-in types are implemented as objects. The data types that represent numbers have methods. Even functions are themselves objects with methods.

Although practicality beats purity: Python supports multiple programming styles to give users the choice to select the style that is most suitable for their problem. It supports OOP, procedural, functional, and many more types of programming.

Errors should never pass silently: It uses the concept of exception handling to avoid handling errors at low level APIs so that they may be handled at a higher level while writing the program that uses these APIs. It supports the concept of standard exceptions with specific meanings, and users are allowed to define exceptions for custom error handling. To support debugging of code, the concept of traceback is provided. In Python programs, by default, the error handling mechanism prints a complete traceback pointing to the error in stderr. The traceback includes the source filename, line number, and source code, if it is available.

Unless explicitly silenced: To take care of some situations, there are options to let an error pass by silently. For these situations, we can use the try statement without except. There is also an option to convert an exception into a string.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess: Automatic type conversion is performed only when it is not surprising. For example, an operation between an integer operand with a float operand results in a float value.

There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it: This is very obvious. It requires elimination of all redundancy. Hence, it is easier to learn and remember.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch: The way that we discussed in the previous point is applicable to the standard library. Of course, there will be redundancy in third-party modules. For example, we have support for multiple GUI APIs, such as as GTK, wxPython, and KDE. Similarly for web programming, we have Django, AppEngine, and Pyramid.

Now is better than never: This statement is meant to motivate users to adopt Python as their favorite tool. There is a concept of ctypes meant to wrap existing C/C++ shared libraries for use in Python programs.

Although never is often better than *right* now: With this philosophy, the Python Enhancement Proposals (PEP) processed a temporary moratorium (suspension) on all changes to the syntax, semantics, and built-in components for a specified period to promote the alternative development catch-up.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea and If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea: In Python all the changes to the syntax, new library modules, and APIs will be processed through a highly rigorous process of review and approval.