Last Updated: March 21, 2021 by Quote.cc Team
Steve Jobs is remembered as a tremendous innovator as The former CEO of Apple. Most of us fell in love with Steve Jobs through the Apple Inc. brand and its innovative products (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad .etc). His drive for perfection in everything he touched revolutionized six industries: Animated Movies, PC, Music, Phones, Tablets and Digital publishing. He changed the way we live.
Below are 70 inspiring quotes from Steve Jobs that will inspire you to take risks, think big, and have a passion for what you do. These Steve Jobs quotes come from Walter Isaacson’s works, interviews, his famous Stanford University speech, the Think Different commercial, and various sources over the years.
“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.” – 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
“Sometimes, when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.” – Steve Jobs
“Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” – Steve Jobs
“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” – Steve Jobs
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” – 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.” – Steve Jobs
“I want to put a ding in the universe.” – 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
“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
“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.” – 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
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – Steve Jobs
“Picasso had a saying – ‘good artists copy, great artists steal‘ – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” – Steve Job by Walter Isaacson
“I think the things you regret most in life are the things you didn’t do.” – 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 today were the last day of your life, would you want to do what you are about to do today.” – Steve Jobs
“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. It’s 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 it’s been done, but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an 18-hour day job, seven days a week for a while. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive.” – Steve Jobs
“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.” – Steve Jobs
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” – Steve Jobs
“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and everyone should be really excellent because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So, it better be damn good. It better be worth it.” – 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.” – Steve Jobs
“We don’t get a chance to do that many things and everyone should be really excellent because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.” – Steve Jobs
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” – 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
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” – Steve Jobs
“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
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” – Steve Jobs
“The greatest thing is when you do put your heart and soul into something over an extended period of time, and it is worth it.” – 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
“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
“You think, well, focusing is saying yes. No, focusing is about saying no. Focusing is about saying no. And you’ve got to say no, no, no. 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.” – by Walter Isaacson
“Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” – Steve Jobs
“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
“We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here.” – Steve Jobs
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” – Steve Jobs
“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. Just figure out what’s next.” – Steve Jobs
“Things don’t have to change the world to be important.” – Steve Jobs
“We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.” – Steve Jobs
“I don’t really care about being right; I just care about success. You’ll find a lot of people that will tell you I had a very strong opinion, and they presented evidence to the contrary, and five minutes later I changed my mind. 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: The Lost Interview
“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.” – Steve Jobs
“Even if we lose our money, we’ll have a company,” Jobs told Steve Wozniak early on, in the mid-1970s. “For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.” – 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 oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.” – Steve Jobs
“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
“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. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs
“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.” – 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 at the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.” – Steve Jobs
“Sometimes, life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” – Steve Jobs
“We are inventing the future,” [Jobs told a job applicant]. “Think about surfing on the front edge of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-paddling at the tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun. Come down here and make a dent in the universe.” – Steve Jobs
“I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out…And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.” – 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
“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
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.” – Steve Jobs
“The bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.” – 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
“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” – Rolling Stone, June 16
“Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” – Steve Jobs
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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
“When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and…to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. 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.” – Steve Jobs
“My self-identity does not revolve around being a businessman, though I recognize that is what I do. I think of myself more as a person who builds neat things. I like building neat things. I like making tools that are useful to people. I like working with very bright people.” – Steve Jobs
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – 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
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” – Steve Jobs
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently; they’re not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things.” – 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