Over 100 Famous Steve Jobs Quotes

In the dynamic world of technology and innovation, few visionaries have left an indelible mark as profound as Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc. His wisdom, insights, and unyielding pursuit of excellence have not only shaped the trajectory of the tech industry but have also provided timeless guidance for individuals navigating the complexities of life and business. In this blog post, we delve into a curated collection of Steve Jobs quotes, exploring the philosophies that fueled his success, the principles that guided his approach to business, and the visionary perspectives that continue to inspire generations.

• I believe life is an intelligent thing: that things aren’t random. –
• Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
• 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.
• Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
• That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: 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.
• What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we’re going to reinvent the phone.
• I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
• Older people sit down and ask, ‘What is it?’ but the boy asks, ‘What can I do with it?’.
• We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.
• Details matter. It’s worth waiting to get it right.
• It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.
• For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
• My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others’ negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.
• Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
• Don’t let others convince you that your ideas are not worth pursuing.
• 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.
• As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.
• Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.
• If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.
• These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.
• Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
• 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.
• Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.
• You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology—not the other way around.
• We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?
• Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
• I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.
• The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
• If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.
• Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
• I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.
• Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.
• Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.
• Think different.
• Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus’ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.
• We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent.
• 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.
• Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
• Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
• I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.
• I want to put a ding in the universe.
• The journey is the reward.
• The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.
• The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do.
• We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.
• What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‘outside the box,’ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.
• I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
• You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
• I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback.
• It’s not the tools that you have faith in – tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I’m still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.
• If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.
• I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.
• 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. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
• The only thing you need to measure is customer delight.
• For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
• Things don’t have to change the world to be important. –
• Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
• Sometimes you need to let go of something old to make room for something new.
• Don’t let success go to your head and failure go to your heart.
• It’s not about the money. It’s about making something you believe in.
• I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.
• My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time. –
• Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
• When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.
• You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.
• Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
• The only thing that’s changed is everything.
• I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of 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.
• 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.
• I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
• 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 most precious thing we have is time. Don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
• It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.
• 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.
• The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.
• Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
• Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.
• It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that makes our hearts sing.
• Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice.
• Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people. –
• The only way you can create great work is if you love what you do.
• Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.
• No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet 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.
• You can’t get a do-over, so make every moment count.
• 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.
• 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.
• I think the things you regret most in life are the things you didn’t do.
• Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
• The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.
• The only thing standing between you and your goal is the story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.
• It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. We just want to make great products.
• Great artists steal.
• Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.
• I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long.
• We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.
• 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.
• I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.
• You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
• Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
• It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.
• The only way to do great work is to love what you do.
• An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.
• It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.
• Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.
• My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
• The only thing that works is managing your own destiny.
• Creativity is just connecting things.
• 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.

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