Steve Jobs Quotes

“For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye. This is who I am, and you can’t expect me to be someone I’m not.”

“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.”

“Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out.”

“We do not say anything about future products. We work on them in secret, then we announce them.”

“When you have feelings like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.”

“Death is very likely the single best invention of life.”

“As Regis Mckenna once said, the best marketing is education”

“I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning.”

“We're not going to be the first to this party, but we're going to be the best.”

“Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time you have to give up other lives you could be living. You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished. Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person.”

“I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.”

“[In school] I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”

“Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

“LSD...reinforc ed my sense of what was important-creat ing great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

“In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.”

“What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

“We've demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don't let it burn a hole in our pocket, we don't allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we'd like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.”

“Focus is about saying, No. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.”

“Bottom line is, I didn't return to Apple to make a fortune. I've been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn't going to let it ruin my life. There's no way you could ever spend it all, and I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.”

“That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex.”

“That's always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they're passionate about. It's that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.”

“I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.”

“The Macintosh was supposed to be the computer for people that just wanted to use a computer without having to learn how to use one.”

“Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experienes that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes.”