Quotes by Steve Jobs (Page 2 of 2)

We're here to put a dent in the universe.

Focus on what you are good at; delegate all else.

What make you think that if you can't finish a project in 18 months, you will be able to do that 18 months later?

Get your mind around it. You can do it.

Every child should learn to program a computer because it will teach you how to think.

I bleed in six colors.

The goal is not to be the richest man in the cemetery.

When You Need A Miracle, Be Miracle.

Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.

In your life you only get to do so many things and right now we've chosen to do this, so let's make it great.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

People who know what they are talking about don't need power Point.

Don't let something that doesn't matter cause you to lose something that does.

I want to make a dent in the universe.

I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side.

It's not done until it ships.

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people, and you can change it.

It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.

Keep looking. Don't settle.

We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

It is in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough--it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.

Follow your heart and your intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

If you wanna hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don't stay.

If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you'll be right. Every morning I looked in the mirror and asked myself: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I do today?

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

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away.

If you keep your eye on the profit, you're going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.

I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and... it wasn't that important -- because I never did it for the money.

Innovation is the only way to win.

Creation is messy. You want genius, you get madness; two sides of the same coin.

Pixar is seen by a lot of folks as an overnight success, but if you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.

Real artists ship.

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

And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.... Don't settle.

I've been rejected, but I am still in love.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been No for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything you call life was made up by people no smarter than you.

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.

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.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.

The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.

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.

We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.

In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment -- however you define it.

You can build your own things that other people can use. And once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.

If you don't love it, you're going to fail.

I do not adopt softness towards others because I want to make them better.

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.

I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done.

The people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

We have always been shamelss about stealing great ideas.

Invest time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you.

If you are willing to work hard and ask lots of questions, you can learn business pretty fast.

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 is life's change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new.

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

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R and D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R and D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet -- basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they're gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

We think Android is very, very fragmented, and becoming more fragmented by the day. And as you know, Apple strives for the integrated model so that the user isn't forced to be the systems integrator.

It is piracy, not overt online music stores, which is our main competitor.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

I'm very excited about having the Internet in my den.

We want to reinvent the phone. What's the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones. We want to let you use contacts like never before -- sync your iPhone with your PC or mac.

The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think 'outside the box,' people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: 'Oh, that's just the way things are done around here.' Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

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.

When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.

I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

It's not the tools that you have faith in -- tools are just tools. They work, or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we're going to reinvent the phone.

Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.

I think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we're always trying to do better.

And no, we don't know where it will lead. We just know there's something much bigger than any of us here.

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people -- as remarkable as the telephone.

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it's humorous, all the attention to it, because it's hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that's happened to me.

First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we're going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product -- the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone.

I think right now it's a battle for the mindshare of developers and for the mindshare of customers, and right now iPhone and Android are winning that battle.

The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof.

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.

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.

A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.

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.

If you're gonna make connections which are innovative... you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator... these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.