Quotes from Walter Isaacson

How did he get his ideas? "I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

if you didn't voice your opinion, [Steve Jobs] would mow you down, said Cook. He takes contrary positions to create more discussion, because it may lead to a better result. So if you don't feel comfortable disagreeing, then you'll never survive.

I used to be an angry man myself. I'm a recovering assaholic so I could recognize that in Steve. (quoting Jean-Louis Gassée)

The best and most innovative products don't always win...(it's an) aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked

But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.

never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.

His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we've outgrown our wonder years.

I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight

I believe that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty," he said, "at least for me.

One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will, he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.

Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugar coat it, : he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also,, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.

Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.

When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product.

men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.

The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.

Talent hits a target that no one else can hit," wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. "Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. It was great, he recalled. I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.

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.

Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.

Socrates' method of building an argument through gentle queries, he "dropped my abrupt contradiction" style of argument and "put on the humbler enquirer" of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert.

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.

Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. He ordered them to bring five different options and he would pick the one he liked.