Top 605 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Jobs - Page 7

Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.

If you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part.

If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will.

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.

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

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.

We've gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time.

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.

When we hire someone, even if they are going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers.

My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules... That's because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I've seen it in myself, I don't want to see that happen to my kids.

Not only was [Edwin Land] 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.

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 ... But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

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

When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process. They try to use processes to substitute content.

I told [Bill Gates] I believed every word of what I said but that I should never have said it in public. I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.

Be ready to catch the ball when it is thrown by life.

There are times when you run a marathon and you wonder, Why am I doing this? But you take a drink of water, and around the next bend, you get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.

Great engineers are a huge multiplier.

I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It's very character-building.

I'm as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.

I want to make a dent in the universe.

The Japanese have hit the shores like dead fish. They're just like dead fish washing up on the shores.

There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything.

Every good product I've ever seen is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. They wanted to use it themselves.

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.

I would rather gamble on our vision than make a 'me, too' product.

Customers always want something new

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

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

I was actually a fruitarian at that point in time. I ate only fruit. Now I'm a garbage can like everyone else. And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o'clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And it stuck. And that's why we're called Apple.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.... I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.... It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and you couldn't replace one of these people with fifty average people.

We make tools for people. Tools to create, tools to communicate. The age we're living in, these tools surprise you. ... That's why I love what we do. Because we make these tools, and we're constantly surprised with what people do with them.

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.

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

We had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs.

Don't settle, as with all matters of the heart you'll know when you find it

Everything is important- that success is in the details.

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

The difference between the best worker on computer hardware and the average may be 2 to 1, if you're lucky. With automobiles, maybe 2 to 1. But in software, it's at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you're in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.

Our job is to read things that are not yet on the page.

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.

One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.

Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products... We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence, we'll make some money. But we're really clear about what our goals are.

School was pretty hard for me at the beginning.

the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize the company

This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us

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.

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.

To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. Rightfully or wrongfully, that's how I think.

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

I don't really care about being right, I just care about success.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

Never settle for average.