Steve Jobs Quotes

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.

Electronics was something I could always fall back on when I needed food on the table.

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

Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.

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

It's hard to tell with these Internet startups if they're really interested in building companies or if they're just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don't really want to build a company, they won't luck into it. That's because it's so hard that if you don't have a passion, you'll give up.

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

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

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 believe people with Passion CAN change the World for the Better." -Steve Jobs

For the past 33 years, 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.

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.

If you live each day as it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right

When we started off we didn't know how to spell software.

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.

Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.

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

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.

Recruiting is hard. It's just finding the needles in the haystack. You can't know enough in a one-hour interview.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person that's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. And there's not enough information to do that - it's an intuitive process.

I think the Macintosh was created by a group of people who felt that ah there wasn't a strict vision between sort of science and art.

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 the work I've done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm fifty.

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.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

Bottom line is, I didn't return to Apple to make a fortune. I've been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn't going to let it ruin my life. There's no way you could ever spend it all, and I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.

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.

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.

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.

When the sales guys run the company, the product guys do not matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off.

The reason we wouldn't make a seven-inch tablet isn't because we don't want to hit a price point, it's because we don't think you can make a great tablet with a seven-inch screen.