Quotes About Inspiration

In a sane world, we would be heroes. Teachers would applaud as we walked into the school. There is the smart one, the one who wants to be a writer. And there is the runner.

A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.

But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.

A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way," Einstein once said, "but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There would be times when we'd rack our brains on a user interface problem, and think we'd considered every option, and he would go, Did you think of this? said Fadell. And then we'd all go, Holy Shit. He'd redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.

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.

Everything you've ever done in your life is shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?

he never finished any of the works he began because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.

In other words, the idea for the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone. 

Innovation requires articulation.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom

During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least

Not since the original Mac had a clarity of product vision so propelled a company into the future. If anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. —Apple's "Think Different" commercial, 1997

The tale of their teamwork is important because we don't often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.

There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.