Quotes from Walter Isaacson

The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it," he told me. "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery.

Like Jobs, Wozniak learned a lot at his father's knee. But their lessons were different. Paul Jobs was a high school dropout who, when fixing up cars, knew how to turn a tidy profit by striking the right deal on parts. Francis

His embrace, however, did not extend to people who were pretentious or pompous (with the exception of Wiener). When he thought a speaker was spouting nonsense, he would stand up and ask what seemed to be innocent but were in fact devilish questions. After a few moments, the speaker would realize he had been deflated and Licklider would sit down. "He didn't like poseurs or pretenders," Tracy recalled. "He was never mean, but he slyly pricked people's pretensions.

Una de sus máximas clave relativas a la inversión era apostar por la gente más que por la idea.

Among them was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. "I learned about serif and sans 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.

Over dinner at a Georgian restaurant that specialized in shish kebab, Jobs continued his rant.

Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too," said Hertzfeld. "The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer," Jobs told Fortune shortly after retaking the reins at Apple. "But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.

Mystery to Leonardo was a shadow, a smile and a finger pointing into darkness.

Every six months he would take most of his team on a two-day retreat at a nearby resort.

He was furious, and that was reflected in his passion to start what was, no matter how he spun it, a rival company.

living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it," he told me. "I think different religions are different doors to the

Buddhism, was not just some passing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his typical intensity, and it became deeply ingrained in his personality. "Steve is very much Zen," said Kottke. "It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense

His wife also did not request any restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest

Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make democracies.

This would require moving a million tons of earth, and Leonardo calculated the man-hours necessary by doing a detailed time-and-motion study, one of the first in history. He figured out everything from the weight of one shovel-load of dirt (twenty-five pounds) to how many shovel-loads would fill a wheelbarrow (twenty). His answer: it would take approximately 1.3 million man-hours, or 540 men working 100 days, to dig the Arno diversion ditch.

Cuando Einstein se sentía bloqueado mientras trabajaba en la relatividad general, cogía su violín y tocaba música de Mozart hasta que volvía a conectar con lo que él denominaba la «armonía de las esferas».

Search the phrase "the man who invented" on Amazon and you get 1,860 book results. But we have far fewer tales of collaborative creativity, which is actually more important in understanding how today's technology revolution was fashioned.

The Mac, on the other hand, would end up being as "insanely great" as Jobs and his acolytes could possibly make it—but it would not ship for another sixteen months, way behind schedule.

glories of being able to think different, yet until

Einstein once said, "but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

poetry as a language within a language

The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we'd make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it's like, "Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?

This was fortunate. He would have made a poor notary: he got bored and distracted too easily, especially when a project became routine rather than creative.14