Quotes from Walter Isaacson

For Leonardo, this talent may have been connected to growing up with a love of nature while not being overly schooled in received wisdom.

I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking

V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins

His curiosity was aided by the sharpness of his eye, which focused on things that the rest of us glance over.

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As his father and others knew when they drew up the strict contract for his commission, Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.

Some of the most important technologies of our era, such as the fracking techniques developed over the past six decades for extracting natural gas, came about because of countless small innovations as well as a few breakthrough leaps.

movimiento y la emoción, las dos columnas gemelas del arte de Leonardo

His personality was reflected in the products he created.

Oddest of all, there is this entry: "Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men."10 We can imagine Leonardo wanting to do

computers to them, he asked if he could meet Baez. A few weeks later he and Baez

But when he and Zuse proposed it to the German Army in 1942, the commanders said they were confident that they would win the war before the two years it would take to build such a machine.

One of the engineers told Atkinson that there was no way to build such a mouse commercially. After Atkinson complained to Jobs over dinner, he arrived at the office the next day to discover that Jobs had fired the engineer. When his replacement met Atkinson, his first words were, "I can build the mouse.

conception is just the first step. What really matters is execution.

When he was restored to the throne at Apple, we put him on the cover of Time, and soon thereafter he began offering me his ideas for a series we were doing on the most influential people of the century. He had launched his "Think Different" campaign, featuring iconic photos of some of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating.

Aquello reforzó mi convicción de lo que era realmente importante: grandes creaciones en lugar de ganar dinero, devolver tantas cosas al curso de la historia y de la conciencia humana como me fuera posible».

His product comes with an interesting feature called incompatibility," Gates told the Washington Post. "It doesn't run any of the existing software. It's a super-nice computer. I don't think if I went out to design an incompatible computer I would have done as well as he did.

The central area of the retina, known as the fovea, is best at seeing color and small details; the area surrounding the fovea is best at picking up shadows and shadings of black and white. When we look at an object straight on, it appears sharper. When we look at it peripherally, glimpsing it out of the corner of our eye, it is a bit blurred, as if it were farther away.

Dan Bricklin, who conceived the first financial spreadsheet program, VisiCalc.

Doug Engelbart demonstrate his oNLine System, made famous at the Mother of All Demos

caso de John Atanasoff, el olvidado inventor de Iowa, la concepción de la idea es solo el primer paso. Lo que importa realmente es la ejecución.

In those days there was really neat stuff in chemistry sets," Moore recalled, lamenting that government regulations and parental fears have since neutered such kits and probably deprived the nation of some needed scientists. He was able to turn out a small quantity of nitroglycerin, which he made into dynamite.

had just fired somebody that day, and I imagined what it was like for that person to tell his family

What began as a portrait of a silk merchant's young wife became a quest to portray the complexities of human emotion, made memorable through the mysteries of a hinted smile, and to connect our nature to that of our universe. The landscape of her soul and of nature's soul are intertwined.