Top 605 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Jobs - Page 5

At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days. We attract a different type of person—a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes. Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

Breakthrough is how to distinguish a leader and who followed

I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

If you view computer designers as artists, they're really into more of an art form that can be mass-produced, like records, or like prints, than they are into fine arts. They want something where they can express themselves to a large number of people through their medium, and their medium is technology and manufacturing.

John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place which was making great computers for people to use.

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

We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits were the motivation.

By honoring the lives of those we admire, we make our own values known.

The problem with the Internet startup craze isn't that too many people are starting companies; it's that too many people aren't sticking with it. That's somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That's when you find out who you are and what your values are.

I'm not dismissing the value of higher education; I'm simply saying it comes at the expense of experience.

It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans.

You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to sell it.

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.

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

It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

I've read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can't do it forever, and you don't want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.

I don't really care about being right, I just care about success. I don't mind being wrong, and I'll admit that I'm wrong a lot. It doesn't really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.

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

We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

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.

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.

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.

Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.

When you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

I'm not worried about the country's long-term future. This country is insanely great. What I'm worried about is that we don't talk enough about solutions.

We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want.

I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we've just taken it.

We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

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

We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place; the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.

People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

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.

Shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s? another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes.

Innovation is saying 'no' to 1,000 things.

The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we've got to risk it, too.

Your customers dream of a happier and better life. Don't move products. Instead, enrich lives.

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

I was at Reed [College] for only a few months. My parents intended for me to stay there for all four years but I decided that college wasn't right for me. I had no idea what I wanted to do I didn't see how college was going to help me.

You have to be burning with "an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right." If you're not passionate enough from the start, you'll never stick it out.

[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.

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

It's very simple: The more successful you are, the more you'll earn. But if you're not successful, you will not earn a dime.

Find people who are competent and really bright, but more importantly, people who care exactly about the same things you care about.

I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.

To follow the path that others have laid before you is a reasonable course of action; therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.

Without death there would be very little progress.

None of us are as creative as all of us.

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

You need to have a collaborative hiring process.

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do.

We all have a short period of time on this earth-We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we're going to be here nor do I, but my feeling is I've got to accomplish a lot of these things while I'm young.

I don't think of my life as a career. I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That's not a career - it's a life!

Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path.