Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena-magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams-which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote a friend later in life. "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.
Walter IsaacsonLeonardo da Vinci had such a playful curiosity. If you read his notebooks, you'll see he's curious about what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like, but also why the sky is blue, or how an emotion forms on somebody's lips. He understood the beauty of everything. I've admired Leonardo my whole life, both as a kid who loved engineering - he was one of the coolest engineers in history - and then as a college student, when I travelled to see his notebooks and paintings.
Walter IsaacsonHe had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn't think I could do.... If you trust him, you can do things. If he's decided that something should happen, then he's just going to make it happen. (Elizabeth Holmes)
Walter IsaacsonI was on one of my fruitarian diets" Steve Jobs recalled "I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book. He told Wozniak if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with apple and they did. 1 Apr 1976
Walter IsaacsonI think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.
Walter IsaacsonThe Mona Lisa, to me, is the greatest emotional painting ever done. The way the smile flickers makes it a work of both art and science, because Leonardo understood optics, and the muscles of the lips, and how light strikes the eye - all of it goes into making the Mona Lisa's smile so mysterious and elusive.
Walter IsaacsonIf you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.
Walter Isaacson