Dive into a treasure trove of wisdom and inspiration with “176 Steve Jobs Quotes That Will Ignite Your Creativity and Innovation.” Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder of Apple Inc., was not just a tech visionary but also a profound thinker whose words continue to shape the world of innovation. This collection of 176 carefully curated quotes encapsulates his unique insights into creativity, innovation, and the relentless pursuit of excellence. Whether you’re an entrepreneur seeking guidance, a designer searching for inspiration, or simply someone looking to infuse your life with a spark of creativity, these quotes serve as a guiding light. Let Steve Jobs’ words resonate with you as you embark on your own journey of innovation and creativity, inspiring you to think differently and make a lasting impact on the world.
Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was a renowned American entrepreneur, inventor, and co-founder of Apple Inc. He was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, and grew up in Silicon Valley. Jobs was instrumental in the development of the personal computer industry and played a pivotal role in the creation of some of the most iconic consumer technology products in history.
Steve Jobs Quotes
‘”Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world.”‘
‘”My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company.”‘
‘”Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”‘
‘”As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?”’
‘”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.”‘
‘”Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry.”‘
‘”When we create stuff, we do it because we listen to customers, get their inputs and also throw in what we’d like to see, too. We cook up new products. You never really know if people will love them as much as you do.”‘
‘”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. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”‘
‘”If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.”‘
‘”We are gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make ‘me-too’ products. For us, it’s always the next dream.”‘
‘”We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build”‘
‘”The best ideas have to win.”‘
‘”I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist.”‘
‘”The people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.”‘
‘”The key thing that comes true is that they had a variety of experiences which they could draw upon, in order to try to solve a problem or to attack a particular dilemma in a kind of unique way.”‘
‘”We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves”‘
‘”Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.”‘
‘”The theme of the campaign is ‘Think different’. It’s honoring the people who think different, and who move this world forward.”‘
‘”My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going the change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away – you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.”‘
‘”A lot of people that would have been artists and scientists have gone into this field to express their feeling and so it seemed like the right thing to do.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”If they are working in an environment where excellence is expected, then they will do excellent work without anything but self-motivation. I’m talking about an environment in which excellence is noticed and respected and is in the culture. If you have that, you don’t have to tell people to do excellent work. They understand it from their surroundings”‘
‘”I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.”‘,
‘”The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”‘
‘”Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.”‘
‘”We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes.”‘
‘”How do you know the direction to head with products? It boils down to taste. Emerge yourself with the best ideas from the humanities. And integrate them. Pull interests from diverse areas.”‘
‘”You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest.”‘
‘”Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.”‘
‘”We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back and fix it. And I cannot say strongly enough that the repercussions of that attitude are staggering. I’ve seen them again and again throughout my business life.”‘
‘”I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.”‘
‘”When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process.”‘
Steve Jobs Quotes on Success
‘”I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating.”‘
‘”The smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company on the web.”‘
‘”Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”‘
‘”Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art.”‘
‘”We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It’s pretty great.”‘
‘”We believe that customers are smart and want objects which are well thought through.”‘
‘”If you are willing to work hard and ask lots of questions, you can learn business pretty fast.”‘
‘”My favorite things in life don’t cost any money.”‘
‘”The most powerful person in business is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”‘
‘”Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”Apple is about something more than that, Apple, at the core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”‘
‘”I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes.”‘
‘”When you die, it doesn’t just all disappear.”‘
‘”Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”‘
‘”Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan’s poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff.”‘
‘”Focusing is about saying no”‘
‘”I believe life is an intelligent thing, that things aren’t random.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”Life goes on and you learn from it.”‘
‘”I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail.”‘
‘”If you act like you can do something, then it will work.”‘
Steve Jobs Quotes on Leadership
‘”Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask. And that’s what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people that just dream about them.”‘
‘”Obviously, one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think. What we’re finding is that computers are actually going to affect the quality of thinking as more and more of our children have these tools available to them.”‘
‘”Most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask. I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.”‘
‘”Besides Dylan, I was interested in Eastern mysticism, which hit the shores at about the same time.”‘,
‘”The most important thing is a person. A person who incites and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.”‘
‘”We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.”‘
‘”We want to stand at the intersection of computers and humanism.”‘
‘”There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind’. It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.”‘
‘”We designed iMac to deliver the things consumers care about most: the excitement of the Internet and the simplicity of the Mac.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world and that’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true.”‘
‘”Apple’s the only company left in this industry that designs the whole widget. Hardware, software, developer relations, marketing.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world and that’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true.”‘
‘”I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.”‘
‘”We think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”What if Apple didn’t exist? Think about it. Time wouldn’t get published next week. Some 70% of the newspaper in the U.S. wouldn’t publish tomorrow morning. Some 60% of the kids wouldn’t have computers; 64% of the teachers wouldn’t have computers. More than half the Websites created on Macs wouldn’t exist. So there’s something worth saving here. See?”‘
‘”A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a super calculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”Our DNA is as a consumer company – for that individual customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s who we think about.”‘
‘”I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think.”‘
‘”The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind.”‘
‘”We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”‘
‘”Talking about bicycles: Human are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. We actually ran an ad like this early at Apple that the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind and I believe that with every bone in my body that all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near, if not at the top, as history unfolds and we look back.”‘
‘”Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”‘
‘”You know, everybody has a cell phone, but I don’t know one person who likes their cell phone. I want to make a phone that people love.”‘
Steve Jobs Quotes on Life
‘”What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”‘
‘”Invest time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you.”‘
‘”This is what customers pay us for – to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers.”‘
‘”I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers.”‘
‘”Well, I was thrown out of school a few times.”‘
‘”What we’re trying to do is remove the barrier of having to learn how to use a computer.”‘
‘”You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.”‘
‘”On the MacIntosh: It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.”‘
‘”What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values.”‘
‘”I have always found Buddhism – Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular – to be aesthetically sublime. The most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto.”‘
‘”The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.”‘
‘”If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity item, where the romance is done, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I’ll feel I have lost Apple. But if I’m a million miles away, and all those people still feel those things… then I will feel that my genes are still there.”‘
‘”We have no idea how far it’s going to go.”‘
‘”Every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.”‘
‘”One of the things that made Apple great was that, in the early days, it was built from the heart.”‘
‘”Humans are tool builders. We create things to amplify ourselves. The computer will rank at the top – it’s the most awesome tool ever.”‘
‘”Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain, these concepts and fitting them all together in kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”We spent two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”We will make them bright and pure and honest about being high-tech, rather than a heavy industrial look of black, black, black, black, like Sony.”‘
‘”It’s very interesting, I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over 10 million when I was 24 and over a hundred million when I was 25 and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”‘
‘”It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”‘
Steve Jobs Quotes on Death
‘”You’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about, otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days.”‘
‘”To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”‘
‘”You get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.”‘
‘”I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”‘
‘”I was lucky, I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20.”‘
‘”Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”‘
‘”Without death, there would be very little progress.”‘
‘”The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”‘
‘”Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.”‘
‘”You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.”‘
‘”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 and things like that.”‘
‘”I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.”‘
‘”It’s painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them; but I found my job has sometimes exactly been that – to get rid of some people who didn’t measure up and I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way. But nonetheless it has to be done and it is never fun.”‘
‘”Creativity is just connecting things.”‘
‘”My number one job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself.”‘
‘”We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I’ve participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000+ people in my life. So I take it very seriously.”‘
‘”Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack.”‘
‘”They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, are they going to fall in love with Apple?”‘,
‘”If they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.”‘
‘”I want to see what people are like under pressure”‘
‘”My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”What I do all day, is meet with teams of people, and work on ideas, and solve problems, to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.”‘
‘”What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them.”‘
‘”My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it.”‘
‘”No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.”‘
‘”I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.”‘
‘”In business, if I knew earlier what I know now, I’d have probably done some things a lot better than I did, but I also would’ve probably done some other things a lot worse. But so what? It’s more important to be engaged in the present.”‘
‘”We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know…”‘
‘”There was a constant flow of intellectual questioning about the truth of life. That was a time when every college student in this country read Be Here Now and Diet for a Small Planet – there were about ten books.”‘
‘”If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust you a lot.”‘
‘”The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it.”‘
‘”And you can change it, you can influence it.”‘
‘”There is no reason not to follow your heart.”‘
‘”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 and don’t settle.”‘
‘”If today were the last of your life, would you do what you were going to do today?”‘
‘”Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”‘
‘”Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”Now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish‘.”‘
‘”You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”‘
‘”People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”‘
‘”One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”‘
‘”There is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product.”‘
‘”Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart.”‘
‘”We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.”‘
‘”That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity.”‘
‘”I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young, when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.”‘
‘”I think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful.”‘
‘”The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.”‘
‘”We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. We just want to make great products.”‘
‘”Don’t get hung up on who owns the idea. Pick the best one, and let’s go.”‘
‘”The most precious thing that we all have with us is time.”‘
‘”You can build your own things that other people can use. And once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again”‘
‘”If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.”‘
‘”I do not adopt softness towards others because I want to make them better”‘
‘”The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.”‘
‘”Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves”‘
‘”Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.”‘
‘”You have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future”‘
‘”I don’t care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing”‘
‘”I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done”‘
‘”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.”‘
‘”Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.”‘,
