Steve Jobs was one of the most influential technology icons to ever live. He’s also responsible for most
of the life changing products known to man. In this post you’ll find 101 of Steve Jobs most inspirational and
shareable quotes.
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Top Quotes By Steve Jobs
“The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
“Don’t take it all too seriously. 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.”
“We could build a little thing that could control a giant thing and that was an incredible lesson.”
“You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
“You have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
“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.”
Technology & Design Quotes By Steve Jobs
“What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of
a bicycle for our minds.”
“We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want
to turn your brain on.”
“I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language
because it teaches you how to think.”
“Human are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities.”
“You’re asking, where does aesthetic judgment come from? With many things: high-performance automobiles, for
example, the aesthetic comes right from the function, and I suppose electronics is no different.”
“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.”
“We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.”
“You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.”
“Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer
layers of the product or service.”
“I believe that with every bone in my body that all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank
near, if not at the top, as history unfolds and we look back.”
“It is the most awesome tool that we ever invented. And I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right
place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time historically where this invention has taken form.”
“There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer.”
“We will make them bright and pure and honest about being high-tech, rather than a heavy industrial look of
black, black, black, black, like Sony.”
“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.”
“The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!”
“Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain, these concepts and fitting them all
together in kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want.”
“I have always found Buddhism – Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular – to be aesthetically sublime. The most
sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto.”
“Look at the Mercedes design, the proportion of sharp detail to flowing lines. Over the years, they have made
the design softer but the details starker. That’s what we have to do with the Macintosh.”
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.”
“Our DNA is as a consumer company – for that individual customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down.
That’s who we think about.”
“We think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience.”
“What we’re trying to do is remove the barrier of having to learn how to use a computer.”
“This is what customers pay us for – to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our
computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers.”
“I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No
matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can
assimilate anyway.”
“We spent two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old
washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.”
“For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
“It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come
up with elegant solutions.”
“We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen,
are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.”
“I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers.”
Life & Death Quotes By Steve Jobs
“In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however you define it.”
“If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust you a lot.”
“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your
life inside the world…Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited
life. Life can be much broader than that.”
“The only thing you have in your life is time. If you invest that time in yourself to have great experiences
that are going to enrich you, then you can’t possibly lose.”
“There was a constant flow of intellectual questioning about the truth of life. That was a time when every
college student in this country read Be Here Now and Diet for a Small Planet – there were about ten books.”
“What a circle of life. You know? Life is just always mysterious and surprising, and you never know what’s
around the next corner.”
“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…”
“In business, if I knew earlier what I know now, I’d have probably done some things a lot better than I did,
but I also would’ve probably done some other things a lot worse. But so what? It’s more important to be
engaged in the present.”
“I think the things you most regret in life are things you didn’t do. What you really regret was never asking
that girl to dance.”
“I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are
obsolete.”
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.”
“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.”
“I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at
first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young.”
“Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.”
“Without death, there would be very little progress.”
Simplicity & Quality Quotes By Steve Jobs
“Focusing is about saying no.”
“I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”
“Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”
“You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because
once you get there, you can move mountains.”
“I have a very simple life. I have my family and I have Apple and Pixar. And I don’t do much else.”
“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money.”
“Well, my favorite things in life are books, sushi and… My favorite things in life don’t cost any money.”
“It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”
“I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.”
“The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s
make it simple. Really simple.”
“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products – they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make
something much more holistic and simple.”
“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex,
and most people stop there. But if you keep going…you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and
simple solutions.”
“We believe that customers are smart and want objects which are well thought through.”
“Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been
done before.”
“Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus
much more.”
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at
all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”
“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.”
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
“We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back
and fix it. And I cannot say strongly enough that the repercussions of that attitude are staggering.”
“We’re not going to be the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best.”
“There’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship.”
“Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.”
“The Lisa people wanted to do something great. And the Mac people want to do something insanely great. The
difference shows.”
“If they are working in an environment where excellence is expected, then they will do excellent work without
anything but self-motivation.”
“I have to tell you there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship, that we wouldn’t be
proud to recommend to our family and friends. And we can’t do it, we just can’t ship junk.”
“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.”
Innovation Quotes By Steve Jobs
“I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes.”
“It’s very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete…you find that the people that
really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.”
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM
was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how
you’re led, and how much you get it.”
“The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.”
“Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you
learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.”
“The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried
to do – keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
“I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.”
“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.”
“It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing
ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”
“You can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford,
right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.”
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving
your other innovations.”
“The theme of the campaign is ‘Think different’. It’s honoring the people who think different, and who move
this world forward.”
“Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who
were troublemakers at other companies.”
“The people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.”
“If I had to pick one of those two I’m clearly a hippie. All the people that I worked with were clearly in
that category too.”
“I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things
together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have
that insight.”
Wrapping Things Up
If you like any of the quotes don’t hesitate to share your favorites. If you have any quotes you think should be
added to this list, drop them in the comments section below. Tell us which quotes are your favorites.
Also, check out 201 Most Inspirational Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Quotes. You’ll be happy you did.
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