Quotes from Walter Isaacson

study of the rise and fall and rise of Apple and the brutal clashes that destroyed friendships and careers. And it is a gadget lover's dream, with fabulous, inside accounts of how the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad came into being. But more than

Retain a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life, most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, "You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."5 We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.

Eckert, with his passion for detail and perfection, was the chief engineer. Eckert became so dedicated to the project that he would sometimes sleep next to the machine. Once, as a joke, two engineers picked up his cot and gently moved him to an identical room one floor up; when he awoke he briefly feared the machine had been stolen.

The first RFC went out on April 7, 1969, mailed in old-fashioned envelopes through the postal system. (There was no such thing as email, since they hadn't invented the network yet.)

The Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality

order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.

It's not something I want to judge Steve by.

Jobs obsessed over every aspect of the new building, from the overall concept to the tiniest detail regarding materials and construction. Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture, said Pixar's president Ed Catmull. Jobs controlled the creation of the building as if he were a director sweating each scene of a film. The PIxar building was Steve's own movie, Lasseter said.

I'll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he's fallen in love with." But he was also willing to fight with its management if need be. "When someone calls you a thief in public, you have to respond." Apple's

inevitable call from him saying, "This hotel sucks, let's go." But Ive also captured the scattershot brilliance at the core of Jobs's genius when he described his boss tossing out ideas at a meeting. "Sometimes they were dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But

By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things

tangerine clam, and a professional desktop computer that suggested a Zen ice cube. Like bell-bottoms that turn up in the

I came to work with Steve for a week," Lin recalled.

What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect.

Leonardo fell into that category. He was born out of wedlock, gay, left-handed, a vegetarian, and was easily distracted, and that helped instill a sense of wonder at how he fit into this world.

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

After his excursion into comparative anatomy, Leonardo proceeded to delve deeper into the mechanisms of humans as they smile or grimace (fig. 111). He focused on the role of various nerves in sending signals to the muscles, and he asked a question that was central to his art: Which of these are cranial nerves originating in the brain, and which are spinal nerves?

Laurene Powell, said bluntly, "If you're ever going to do a book on Steve, you'd better do it now." He had just taken a second

It emphasized rationality and functionality by employing clean lines and forms. Among the maxims preached by Mies and Gropius were "God is in the details" and "Less is more.

Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, "Turn on, boot up, jack in.

old physicist joke: they knew that the approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory?

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

Leonardo had a free-range mind that merrily wandered across all the disciplines of the arts, sciences, engineering, and humanities. His knowledge of how light strikes the retina helped inform the perspective in The Last Supper, and on a page of anatomical drawings depicting the dissection of lips he drew the smile that would reappear in the Mona Lisa. He knew that art was a science and that science was an art.

veteran colleagues at Apple used to call his "reality distortion field." Sometimes it was the inadvertent misfiring of memory