110+ Steve Jobs Quotes: A Journey Through His Life and Work

Steve Jobs was an American business magnate and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. He was widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Steve Jobs on leadership, death, innovation.

Top 10 Steve Jobs Quotes

1. It's not about where you end up, or how you got there, it's about where you're going next.
2. The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
3. 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.
4. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
5. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.
6. Make it like a sunflower.
7. Stay hungry, stay foolish. You've got to find what you love!
8. 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.
9. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.
10. Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

Steve Jobs Image Quotes

Stay hungry, stay foolish. You've got to find what you love! — Steve Jobs

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. — Steve Jobs

Time is so limited. Don’t waste it trying to be someone else. — Steve Jobs

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. — Steve Jobs

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. — Steve Jobs

Learn continually - there's always "one more thing" to learn! — Steve Jobs

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work — Steve Jobs

We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. — Steve Jobs

I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Short Quotes

• Time is so limited. Don’t waste it trying to be someone else.
• Everything is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period.
• Learn continually - there's always "one more thing" to learn!
• Packaging can be theater, it can create a story
• Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right.
• And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.
• We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
• I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
• If you don't have a passion, you'll give up.
• There are sneakers that cost more than an iPod.

Steve Jobs Quotes About Leadership

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

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. — Steve Jobs

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. — 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

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

We've got to make the small things unforgettable. — Steve Jobs

The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we've got to risk it, too. — Steve Jobs

It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it. — Steve Jobs

I would rather gamble on our vision than make a 'me, too' product. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Death

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. — 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. — Steve Jobs

If you live each day as it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. — Steve Jobs

You're already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow. — Steve Jobs

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. — Steve Jobs

Probably death is the best invention of life. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Innovation

Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity - not a threat — Steve Jobs

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. — Steve Jobs

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. — Steve Jobs

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. — Steve Jobs

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work — Steve Jobs

You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best. — Steve Jobs

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations. — Steve Jobs

Don't settle, as with all matters of the heart you'll know when you find it — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Life

My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time. — Steve Jobs

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. — Steve Jobs

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. — Steve Jobs

Focus and simplicity...once you get there, you can move mountains. — Steve Jobs

I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I'm only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I've got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that. — 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. — Steve Jobs

Shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. — Steve Jobs

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Success

Do your best at every job. Don't sleep! Success generates more success so be hungry for it. Hire good people with a passion for excellence. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and you couldn't replace one of these people with fifty average people. — Steve Jobs

I want to put a ding in the universe. — Steve Jobs

I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from non-successful ones is perseverance. — Steve Jobs

You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. — Steve Jobs

You've got to find what you love. — Steve Jobs

All of us need to be on guard against arrogance, which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful. — Steve Jobs

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Love

Sometimes life's going to hit 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. — Steve Jobs

Love what you do...Don't settle — Steve Jobs

When you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. 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. — Steve Jobs

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. — Steve Jobs

I had been rejected, but I was still in love. — Steve Jobs

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. — Steve Jobs

I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money. — Steve Jobs

And I sort of look at us as two of the luckiest guys [Bill Gates the other] on the planet because we found what we loved to do and we were at the right place at the right time and we've gotten to go to work every day with super bright people for 30 years and do what we love doing. — Steve Jobs

There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will. — Steve Jobs

It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy. On the importance of loving what you do. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Work

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

Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology - not the other way around. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs

I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

A lot of people think big business in America is a bad thing. I think it's a really good thing. Most people in business are ethical, hard-working, good people. And it's a meritocracy. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Design

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. — Steve Jobs

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

We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation. — Steve Jobs

The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. — Steve Jobs

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation — Steve Jobs

After all the statistics and calculations are formulated, the one element that breathes life into marketing is good design. — Steve Jobs

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs

I told [Bill Gates] I believed every word of what I said but that I should never have said it in public. I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger. — Steve Jobs

I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. — Steve Jobs

Bill Gates'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Money

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it's humorous, all the attention to it, because it's hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that's happened to me. — Steve Jobs

[My teacher] basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn. — Steve Jobs

I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and... it wasn't that important — because I never did it for the money. — Steve Jobs

LSD...reinforc ed my sense of what was important-creat ing great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could. — Steve Jobs

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation. — Steve Jobs

That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products... We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence, we'll make some money. But we're really clear about what our goals are. — Steve Jobs

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R amp&; 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. — Steve Jobs

I used to sleep on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food, money, and getting weekly free meals at a local temple — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Technology

It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing. — Steve Jobs

Pixar is the most technically advanced creative company; Apple is the most creatively advanced technical company. — Steve Jobs

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates. — Steve Jobs

What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. — Steve Jobs

I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning. — Steve Jobs

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

We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream. — Steve Jobs

I'd say we [Apple Inc.] are the most creative of the technology companies and definitely the most artist-friendly. Almost everyone in the music business uses a Mac and everyone has an iPod. — Steve Jobs

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. — Steve Jobs

The creative industries tend to dismiss technology as just something to buy and not understand how hard it is and how creative it can be as well. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Innovative

Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experiences. But if you have the same experiences as everyone else, you are unlikely to look in a different direction. — Steve Jobs

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

I'm as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things. — Steve Jobs

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade. — Steve Jobs

the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize the company — Steve Jobs

I know you have 1000 great ideas for things that iTunes could do. And we have 1000 more. But innovation is not about saying "yes" to everything. It's about saying "no" to all but the most crucial features. — Steve Jobs

It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy. — Steve Jobs

Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening. — Steve Jobs

You know, you keep on innovating, you keep on making better stuff. And if you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About People

It's not the tools you have faith in. Tools are just tools. It's the people you have faith in or not. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint. — Steve Jobs

Manage the top line: your strategy, your people, and your products, and the bottom line will follow. — Steve Jobs

Older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?' but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?'. — Steve Jobs

The hardest thing when you think about focusing. You think focusing is about saying "Yes." No. Focusing is about saying "No." And when you say "No," you piss off people. — Steve Jobs

I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do. — Steve Jobs

Don’t let the voice of other people’s opinion drown your inner voice. — Steve Jobs

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits were the motivation. — Steve Jobs

Marketing is about values. It's a complicated and noisy world, and we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Apple

Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes? — Steve Jobs

But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business. — Steve Jobs

It wasn't that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac, it's that the Mac was a sitting duck for 10 years. That's Apple's problem: Their differentiation evaporated. — Steve Jobs

It's not about charisma and personality, it's about results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to the industry. — Steve Jobs

I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

The thing that drives me and my colleagues at both Apple and Pixar is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don't quite know how to get to it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it's within your grasp. And it's worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. ... Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these. — Steve Jobs

Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could - I'm searching for the right word - could, could die. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About Years

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. — Steve Jobs

The journey is the reward — Steve Jobs

I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It's very character-building. — Steve Jobs

If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years. — Steve Jobs

Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experienes that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes. — Steve Jobs

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. — Steve Jobs

The web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It's going to augment the world. And once you're in this web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place. — Steve Jobs

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap. — Steve Jobs

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: 'Oh, that's just the way things are done around here.' Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business. — Steve Jobs

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes About World

The most powerful person in the world is the story teller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come. — Steve Jobs

Things don't have to change the world to be important. — Steve Jobs

Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world? — Steve Jobs

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world? — Steve Jobs

The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long. — Steve Jobs

I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can't do that. I'd rather quit. — Steve Jobs

Companies must have a noble cause, and it's the leaders 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. — Steve Jobs

I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did. — Steve Jobs

We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Famous Quotes And Sayings

Stay hungry, stay foolish. You've got to find what you love! — Steve Jobs

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. — Steve Jobs

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

The most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do. — Steve Jobs

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. — 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

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. — Steve Jobs

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

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

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

Learn continually - there's always "one more thing" to learn! — 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 ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. — Steve Jobs

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work — Steve Jobs

We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. — Steve Jobs

I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence. — Steve Jobs

I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. — Steve Jobs

Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years into the future about what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist and knew about pigments and human anatomy. Combining all of those skills together—the art and the science, the thinking and the doing—is what resulted in the exceptional result… There is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets. — Steve Jobs

The seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

It's the disease of thinking that a having a great idea is really 90% of the work. And if you just tell people, 'here's this great idea,' then of course they can go off and make it happen. The problem with that is that there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a having a great idea and having a great product. — Steve Jobs

I'm very excited about having the Internet in my den. — 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

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other 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

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. — Steve Jobs

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. — Steve Jobs

It is piracy, not overt online music stores, which is our main competitor. — Steve Jobs

You can tell a lot about a person by who his or her heroes are. — Steve Jobs

You have to have a lot of passion for what you do... because if you don't, any rational person would give up. — Steve Jobs

Be ready to catch the ball when it is thrown by life. — Steve Jobs

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. — Steve Jobs

One way to drive fear out of a relationship is to realize that your partner's values are the same as yours, that what you care about is exactly what they care about. In my opinion, that drives fear out and makes for a great partnership, whether it's a corporate partnership or a marriage. — Steve Jobs

I sat in a garage and invented the future. — Steve Jobs

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn. — Steve Jobs

Life Lessons by Steve Jobs

1. Steve Jobs taught us to be passionate and persistent in our pursuit of our dreams; no matter how difficult the journey may be, it is worth the effort in the end.
2. He also showed us that failure is not the end, but an opportunity to learn and grow.
3. Finally, he taught us the importance of collaboration and teamwork, and that no one person can achieve greatness alone.