Top 605 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Jobs - Page 9

It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Make it like a sunflower.

I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay.

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.

Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.

That's why I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete. I think that's one of Apple's challenges, really. When two young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say this is fantastic? Are you going to be willing to drop our models, or are we going to explain it away? I think we'll do better, because we're completely aware of it and we make it a priority.

With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution.

When I went to school, it was right after the '60s and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in.... The idealistic wind of the '60s was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever.

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down and things may be different tomorrow but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.

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.

I had been rejected, but I was still in love.

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.

A computer is the most incredible tool we've ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer.

I don't need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster... carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison.

That's what makes great products. It's not process-it's content.

And I sort of look at us as two of the luckiest guys [Bill Gates the other] on the planet because we found what we loved to do and we were at the right place at the right time and we've gotten to go to work every day with super bright people for 30 years and do what we love doing.

Our friends up north spend over five billion dollars on research and development and all they seem to do is copy Google and Apple.

Guess who surprised themselves and changed their minds.

The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it.

Making an enduring company was both harder and more important than making a great product.

No one is going to buy a big phone.

Do you want to sell sugar water all your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.

Focus does not mean saying yes, it means saying no.

This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy.

I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.

Good PR educates people; that's all it is. You can't con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.

It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.

Design isn't just how it looks. It's how it works.

Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.

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.

We wanted to more richly experience why we were alive, not just make a better life, and so people went in search of things. The great thing that came from those that time was to realize that there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late sixties and early sixties. We were going in search of something deeper.

People need to have the incentive that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. Otherwise they'll stop investing.

The iPod is not a new category. Music is not new. It's not a speculative market. It's a very, very large market. It's been around for thousands of years and will be around as long as humans exist.

All we are is our ideas, or people. That's what keeps us going to work in the morning, to hang around these great bright people. I've always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.

As Regis Mckenna once said, the best marketing is education

Be honest with yourself and with people always do everything on time. Never give up, go to your goals, even if all the bad. In this life, all really, you only need to do. The more I talk to people, the more I am convinced that in general they have one goal - to become the richest dead in the cemetery.

The biggest effect of the personal computer revolution has been to allow millions and millions of people to experience computers themselves decades before they ever would have in the old paradigm.

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.

Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?

We're not a media company. We don't own media. We don't own music. We don't own films or television. We're not a media company. We're just Apple.

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.

The customer is the final inspector.

The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.

Music companies are not technology companies any more than technology companies are music companies. They're really different from each other.

We're cautious. We'd rather exceed expectations than miss but I think it's going to be a continued difficult economy. Apple is trying a different way to navigate out of this, we're trying to innovate.

I'd rather be a Pirate than join the Navy

After all the statistics and calculations are formulated, the one element that breathes life into marketing is good design.

The web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It's going to augment the world. And once you're in this web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place.

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

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

A lot of people think big business in America is a bad thing. I think it's a really good thing. Most people in business are ethical, hard-working, good people. And it's a meritocracy.

Sometimes life hits you like a brick in the face. Don't give up.

[My teacher] basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn.

The tragedy is that Dell didn't win it - we lost it.

Creativity is just connecting things.

I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend's garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computer and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together.

iMac is next year's computer for $1,299, not last year's computer for $999.