Steve Jobs Quotes

“Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” ~Steve Jobs

“It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.” ~Steve Jobs

“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. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” ~Steve Jobs

“Learn continually – There is always one more thing to learn.” ~Steve Jobs

“Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.” ~Steve Jobs

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” ~Steve Jobs

“Think Different.” ~Steve Jobs

“Start small, think big. Don’t worry about too many things at once. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones. Think about not just tomorrow, but the future. Put a ding in the universe.” ~Steve Jobs

“Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”

“Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.” ~Steve Jobs

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” ~Steve Jobs

“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.” ~Steve Jobs

“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.”

“The people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” ~Steve Jobs

“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.” ~Steve Jobs

“A brand is simply trust.” ~Steve Jobs

“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.” ~Steve Jobs

“Your customers dream of a happier and better life. Don’t move products. Instead, enrich lives.”

“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.” ~Steve Jobs

“Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”

“Companies must have a noble cause, and it’s the leader’s job to transform that noble cause into such an inspiring vision that it will attract the most talented people in the world to want to join it.”

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” ~Steve Jobs

“The best way to create value in the 21st century is to connect Creativity with Technology.”

“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.” ~Steve Jobs

“Focusing is about saying No.” ~Steve Jobs

“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.” ~Steve Jobs

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?” ~Steve Jobs

“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 hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell of go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business.”

“Focus does not mean saying yes, it means saying no.”

“The customer is the final inspector.” ~Steve Jobs

“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 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

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from non-successful ones is pure perseverance. ~Steve Jobs

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.” ~Steve Jobs

“Again, 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.” ~Steve Jobs

“To go forward you have to leave something behind.” ~Steve Jobs

“My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.”

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it.” ~Steve Jobs

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.”

“Creativity is just connecting things.”“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” ~Steve Jobs

“Never settle for average.” ~Steve Jobs

“Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” ~Steve Jobs

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” ~Steve Jobs

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

“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, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”

“If you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.”

“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything you call life was made up by people no smarter than you.” ~Steve Jobs

“We’ve gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time.”

“Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying no to all but the most crucial features.”

“My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.”

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”