Walter Isaacson > Quotes

“One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“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. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“If you act like you can do something, then it will work.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“If 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, Steve Jobs

“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Steve Jobs: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Out job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Walter Issacson biographer of Steve Jobs:

I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden, one day, and he started talking about God. He [Jobs] said, “ 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, maybe it’s because 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.”

Then he paused for a second and said, “Yea, but sometimes, I think it’s just like an On-Off switch. Click. And you’re gone.” And then he paused again and said, “ And that’s why I don’t like putting On-Off switches on Apple devices.”

Joy to the WORLD! There IS an after-life!”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Vision without execution is hallucination. .. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo [da Vinci] knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”
― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

“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 Isaacson

“What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Steve Jobs had a tendency to see things in a binary way: "A person was either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or shit”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“if you can't keep him interested, that's your fault.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Este es un homenaje a los locos. A los inadaptados. A los rebeldes. A los alborotadores. A las fichas redondas en los huecos cuadrados. A los que ven las cosas de forma diferente. A ellos no les gustan las reglas, y no sienten ningún respeto por el statu quo. Puedes citarlos, discrepar de ellos, glorificarlos o vilipendiarlos. Casi lo único que no puedes hacer es ignorarlos. Porque ellos cambian las cosas. Son los que hacen avanzar al género humano. Y aunque algunos los vean como a locos, nosotros vemos su genio. Porque las personas que están lo suficientemente locas como para pensar que pueden cambiar el mundo... son quienes lo cambian”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, he [Einstein] said.”
― Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe

“So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. 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.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”
― Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe