Steve Jobs Quotes

“You have to have a lot of passion for what you do... because if you don't, any rational person would give up.”

“The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work”

“So [Polaroid's Dr. Edwin] Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don't understand why people like that can't be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be - not an astronaut, not a football player - but this.”

“The creative industries tend to dismiss technology as just something to buy and not understand how hard it is and how creative it can be as well.”

“It [what you choose to do] has got to be something that you're passionate about because otherwise you won't have the perseverance to see it through.”

“If I knew in 1986 how much it was going to cost to keep Pixar going, I doubt if I would have bought the company.”

“People say sometimes, "You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world." I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done.”

“Love what you do...Don't settle”

“I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.”

“This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that's what I had.”

“A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

“The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.”

“Start small, think big. Don’t worry about too many things at once. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones. Think about not just tomorrow, but the future. Put a ding in the universe.”

“It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment.”

“I make 50 cents for showing up... and the other 50 cents is based on my performance.”

“Kick-start your brain. New ideas come from watching something, talking to people, experimenting, asking questions and getting out of the office!”

“That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

“If you don't have a passion, you'll give up.”

“I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much - if at all.”

“I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do.”

“If today were my last day, would I do what I'm doing?...If the answer was 'No' too many days in a row, I'd make a change.”

“That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be.”

“Don't just live a life; build one.”

“Unless you've a lot of passion about this, you're not gonna survive. You're gonna give it up. So you've got to have an idea or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about, otherwise you're not gonna have the perseverance to stick it through. I think it's half the battle right there.”