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Steve Jobs

125 quotes

“Most people don’t have very many numbers in their address book they use their recents as their address book. Right? How many of you do that? I bet more than a few.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As he has written in his "Thoughts on Flash" open letter (20 April 2010)
“By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Republished email to Gawker's Ryan Tate, May 2010<!--
“The HD revolution is over, it happened. HD won. Everybody wants HD.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Apple Special Event Keynote (1 September 2010)
“- digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud - PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, ... - Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator's dilemma) - Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven't quite figured it out yet - tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: email sent to his managers staff in 2010, which went public during trial against Samsung
“Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust you a lot”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If it could save a person’s life, could you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson, p. 123
“I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was OK and to thank her, because I'm glad I didn't end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and she went through a lot to have me.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson, p. 254
“You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest…. 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.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson, p. 570
“OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Last words (5 October 2011), as reported by his sister Mona Simpson in her eulogy for her brother on 16 October 2011, at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University; presented in the New York Time…
“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Steve Jobs quoted on Google Android (2010)
“Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this cafe. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, "Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward …" and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this cafe, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions — "Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number"—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic. … 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.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build 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 a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.<!--”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don't blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program Oral History Interview, Advice for Future Entrepreneurs (20 April 1995)
“Jobs: As a kid, I read an article in the Scientific American. It measured the efficiency of locomotion of various species on the planet. Bears. Chimpanzees. Raccoons. Birds. Fish. How many kilo-calories per kilometer did they spend to move? Humans were measured too. And the condor won. It was the most efficient. Humankind came in with an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle. We blew away the condor. Off the charts. This really had an impact on me. Humans are tool builders. We build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. We ran an ad for this once that the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. I believe that with every bone in my body.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people... Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing (February 1996)
“Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world. That’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true and I think... 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, who didn’t know how the world was fifty years ago, who didn’t know how the world was twenty years ago. Who saw it as it is today without any preconceptions, and saw and dreamed how it could be based on that. Who were not satisfied based on the accomplishments of the last thirty years, but who were dissatisfied because the current state didn’t live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Computer World interview with Daniel Morrow (April 1995)
“Microsoft has had two goals. One was to copy the Mac and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn't change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn't deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out. They produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient. But 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. 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.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004)
“Now, I have something to tell you today. Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life — for the past five years. There have been rumors to this effect... but this is Apple's campus in Cupertino — let's zoom in on it — in that building right there... we've had teams doing the "just-in-case" scenario; and our rules have been that our designs for OS X must be processor independent, and that every project must be built for both the Power PC and Intel processors. And so today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of OS X has been compiled for both Power PC and Intel — this has been going on for the last five years. Just in case.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn [the art of decorative or hand lettering]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful. Historical. Artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I found it fascinating. None of this had any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. 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. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From: Steve Jobs To: Steve Jobs Subject: Date: September 2, 2010, 11:08 p.m. I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being. Sent from my iPad”
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source