Quote collection
586 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I don't really care about being right, I just care about success. I don't mind being wrong, and I'll admit that I'm wrong a lot. It doesn't really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing."
"Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service."
"It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment."
"It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they're rare."
"Focusing is all about saying no"
"This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us"
"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything."
"Every good product I've ever seen is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. They wanted to use it themselves."
"I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete."
"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."
"Creativity is just connecting things."
"Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions."
"Overnight success stories take a long time."
"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."
"Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
"We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place; the last thing we were going to do is lay them off."
"We hire people who want to make the best things in the world."
"Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path."
"Fear of failure falls away in the face of death."
"So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things."