Steve Jobs Quotes

I buy everything from CostCo. It's great; they've got everything I need.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they're gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

Our approach is to think of companies not as businesses but as collections of people. We [Apple]want to qualitatively change the way people work. We don't just want to help them do word processing faster or add numbers faster. We want to change the way they can communicate with one another. We're seeing less paper flying around and more quality of communication.

The day I was born songs were on records, phones were tied down, computers needed rooms and the web was fiction. Change the world. You can.

You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company - which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.

If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.

Strategy is figuring out what not to do.

Most people do not ever pick up the phone. They never ask, and that is what separates the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You have to act, and you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to crash and burn, because if you are afraid of failing, you will not get very far.

I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money.

Overnight success stories take a long time.

I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore.

If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.

I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and... it wasn't that important — because I never did it for the money.

We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.

You know we're constantly taking. We don't make most of the food we eat, we don't grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.

You've got to have a problem that you want to solve; a wrong that you want to right.

In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can't switch gears. It's a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they're the same thing.

The were good times, there were hard times, but there were never bad times

And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.

We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life.

I'm convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right.

Whatever you do, you must never let the voice in your head control the brain in your heart.

The web is just going to be one more of those major change factors that businesses face every decade.

It's like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there's some fundamental technology shift, it's just over.

The thing that drives me and my colleagues at both Apple and Pixar is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don't quite know how to get to it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it's within your grasp. And it's worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence.

I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did.

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

If Macintosh hadn't been successful, then I should have just thrown in the towel, because my vision of the whole industry would have been totally wrong.

It's the disease of thinking that a having a great idea is really 90% of the work. And if you just tell people, 'here's this great idea,' then of course they can go off and make it happen. The problem with that is that there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a having a great idea and having a great product.

Without passion, any rational person would give up!

I want to make a dent in the universe.

In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy - there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.

I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products.

Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life... so love what you do. Your time is limited. Don't waste it.

We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the team could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.

We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That's what's driven me.

The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient.

The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person that's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. And there's not enough information to do that - it's an intuitive process.

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people - as remarkable as the telephone.

Great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

I admire Mark Zuckerberg... for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot.

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

That's my job - to make sure everything is great.

Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint.

But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important.

Your time on this earth is limited, don’t live someone else's life, live by your vision.

It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done. And then try to bring those things in to what you're doing.

Pursue your dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

I know that living with me was not a bowl of cherries.

It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.