Leonardo da Vinci was lucky to be born the same year that Johannes Gutenberg opened his printing shop. As a young person, he could get information about whatever struck his curiosity. The Internet is to our age what Gutenberg's press was to his, so he would have loved being alive today.

Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.

...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.

I've asked Jobs why he didn't get an operation then and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened... I didn't want to be violated in that way.'

There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.

If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen.