Steve Jobs (1955-2011), co-founder of Apple Inc., was a visionary entrepreneur and designer known for revolutionizing the technology industry. With a focus on simplicity and innovation, he played a key role in the development of iconic products like the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs co-founded NeXT and Pixar before returning to Apple in 1997. His leadership led to the introduction of groundbreaking products, cementing Apple’s success. Jobs’ legacy extends beyond technology; he is remembered for his influential impact on design, user experience, and the integration of technology into daily life. Despite his controversial persona, Jobs remains an iconic figure who shaped the tech landscape. He passed away on October 5, 2011, leaving a lasting imprint on the industry he helped redefine.
Steve Jobs Quotes
1. “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
— Steve Jobs
2. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
— Steve Jobs
3. “Think Different.”
— Steve Jobs
4. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
— Steve Jobs
5. “Focusing is about saying No.”
— Steve Jobs
6. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
— Steve Jobs
7. “Innovation is the only way to win.”
— Steve Jobs
8. “The journey is the reward.”
— Steve Jobs
9. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
— Steve Jobs
10. “Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”
— Steve Jobs
11. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
— Steve Jobs
12. “Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.”
— Steve Jobs
13. “Creativity is just connecting things.”
— Steve Jobs
14. “Follow your heart and your intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
— Steve Jobs
15. “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs
16. “If you live each day as it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”
— Steve Jobs
17. “Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”
— Steve Jobs
18. “Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.”
— Steve Jobs
19. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
— Steve Jobs
20. “You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”
— Steve Jobs
21. “Learn continually. There’s always “one more thing” to learn.”
— Steve Jobs
22. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
— Steve Jobs
23. “Real artists ship.”
— Steve Jobs
24. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”
— Steve Jobs
25. “Never settle for average.”
— Steve Jobs
26. “To go forward you have to leave something behind.”
— Steve Jobs
27. “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”
— Steve Jobs
28. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
— Steve Jobs
29. “Things don’t have to change the world to be important.”
— Steve Jobs
30. “My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.”
— Steve Jobs
31. “Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying no to all but the most crucial features.”
— Steve Jobs
32. “Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
— Steve Jobs
33. “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat.”
— Steve Jobs
34. “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
— Steve Jobs
35. “I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
— Steve Jobs
36. “What we are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe.”
— Steve Jobs
37. “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
— Steve Jobs
38. “If you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.”
— Steve Jobs
39. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
— Steve Jobs
40. “Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.”
— Steve Jobs
41. “Start small, think big. Don’t worry about too many things at once. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones. Think about not just tomorrow, but the future. Put a ding in the universe.”
— Steve Jobs
42. “I’ve been rejected, but I am still in love.”
— Steve Jobs
43. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
— Steve Jobs
44. “Each dream you leave behind is a part of your future that will no longer exist.”
— Steve Jobs
45. “A brand is simply trust.”
— Steve Jobs
46. “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”
— Steve Jobs
47. “You’ve got to find what you love.”
— Steve Jobs
48. “Whatever you do, you must never let the voice in your head control the brain in your heart.”
— Steve Jobs
49. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.”
— Steve Jobs
50. “Do your best at every job. Don’t sleep! Success generates more success so be hungry for it. Hire good people with a passion for excellence.”
— Steve Jobs
51. “Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.”
— Steve Jobs
52. “Listen to me. We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise why even be here?”
— Steve Jobs
53. “When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”
— Steve Jobs
54. “We don’t settle for anything less than excellence.”
— Steve Jobs
55. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it.”
— Steve Jobs
56. “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”
— Steve Jobs
57. “My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”
— Steve Jobs
58. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”
— Steve Jobs
59. “Click. Boom. Amazing!”
— Steve Jobs
60. “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes.”
— Steve Jobs
61. “We’re not going to be the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best.”
— Steve Jobs
62. “Life can be much broader. You can embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”
— Steve Jobs
63. “Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”
— Steve Jobs
64. “Your customers dream of a happier and better life. Don’t move products. Instead, enrich lives.”
— Steve Jobs
65. “Manage the top line: your strategy, your people, and your products, and the bottom line will follow.”
— Steve Jobs
66. “The customer is the final inspector.”
— Steve Jobs
67. “We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We’re creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. That’s how you have to think of this. We’re rewriting the history of human thought with what we’re doing.”
— Steve Jobs
68. “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
— Steve Jobs
69. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
— Steve Jobs
70. “I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning.”
— Steve Jobs
71. “I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell of go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business.”
— Steve Jobs
72. “In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can’t switch gears. It’s a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they’re the same thing.”
— Steve Jobs
73. “And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”
— Steve Jobs
74. “I would rather gamble on our vision than make a ‘me, too’ product.”
— Steve Jobs
75. “Don’t be evil is a load of crap.”
— Steve Jobs
76. “The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.”
— Steve Jobs
77. “I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.”
— Steve Jobs
78. “Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out.”
— Steve Jobs
79. “I’m not dismissing the value of higher education; I’m simply saying it comes at the expense of experience.”
— Steve Jobs
80. “One way to drive fear out of a relationship is to realize that your partner’s values are the same as yours, that what you care about is exactly what they care about. In my opinion, that drives fear out and makes for a great partnership, whether it’s a corporate partnership or a marriage.”
— Steve Jobs
81. “If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.”
— Steve Jobs
82. “Some people can do one thing magnificently, like Michelangelo, and others make things like semiconductors or build 747 airplanes – that type of work requires legions of people. In order to do things well, that can’t be done by one person, you must find extraordinary people.”
— Steve Jobs
83. “I know that living with me was not a bowl of cherries.”
— Steve Jobs
84. “Companies must have a noble cause, and it’s the leaders job to transform that noble cause into such an inspiring vision, that it will attract the most talented people in the world to want to join it.”
— Steve Jobs
85. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”
— Steve Jobs
86. “The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.”
— Steve Jobs
87. “People need to have the incentive that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. Otherwise they’ll stop investing.”
— Steve Jobs
88. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want.”
— Steve Jobs
89. “You need to have a collaborative hiring process.”
— Steve Jobs
90. “Make it like a sunflower.”
— Steve Jobs
91. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication – Steve Jobs turned this into the slogan behind an early Mac advertising campaign. Which doesn’t make it less true.”
— Steve Jobs
92. “Don’t be afraid, you can do it.”
— Steve Jobs
93. “A lot of people think big business in America is a bad thing. I think it’s a really good thing. Most people in business are ethical, hard-working, good people. And it’s a meritocracy.”
— Steve Jobs
94. “My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.”
— Steve Jobs
95. “If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.”
— Steve Jobs
96. “Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.”
— Steve Jobs
97. “The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don’t understand the software parts of it. And so you really can’t make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple’s the only company that has everything under one roof.”
— Steve Jobs
98. “Focus does not mean saying yes, it means saying no.”
— Steve Jobs
99. “When you have feelings like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.”
— Steve Jobs
100. “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.”
— Steve Jobs
101. “Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.”
— Steve Jobs
102. “The technology companies don’t understand creative things at all. Silicon Valley’s view of the creative process in Hollywood is a bunch of guys in their young thirties sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and thinking up jokes.”
— Steve Jobs
103. “No one is going to buy a big phone.”
— Steve Jobs
104. “Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”
— Steve Jobs
105. “The iPod is not a new category. Music is not new. It’s not a speculative market. It’s a very, very large market. It’s been around for thousands of years and will be around as long as humans exist.”
— Steve Jobs
106. “We’ve gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time.”
— Steve Jobs
107. “I buy everything from Costco. It’s great; they’ve got everything I need.”
— Steve Jobs
108. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
— Steve Jobs
109. “We’re not a media company. We don’t own media. We don’t own music. We don’t own films or television. We’re not a media company. We’re just Apple.”
— Steve Jobs
110. “Technology alone is not enough.”
— Steve Jobs
111. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
— Steve Jobs
112. “The most precious resource we have is time.”
— Steve Jobs
113. “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.”
— Steve Jobs
114. “Customers don’t measure you on how hard you tried, they measure you on what you deliver.”
— Steve Jobs
115. “Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.”
— Steve Jobs
116. “Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”
— Steve Jobs
117. “You’re already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
— Steve Jobs
118. “Life is about creating and living experiences that are worth sharing.”
— Steve Jobs
119. “It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.”
— Steve Jobs
120. “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.”
— Steve Jobs
121. “The best way to create value in the 21st century is to connect Creativity with Technology.”
— Steve Jobs
122. “Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”
— Steve Jobs
123. “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
— Steve Jobs
124. “Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything you call life was made up by people no smarter than you.”
— Steve Jobs
125. “In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.”
— Steve Jobs
126. “Overnight success stories take a long time.”
— Steve Jobs
127. “The most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do.”
— Steve Jobs
128. “Don’t just live a life; build one.”
— Steve Jobs
129. “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.”
— Steve Jobs
130. “Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask, and that’s what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.”
— Steve Jobs
131. “You can’t look at the competition and say you’re going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say you’re going to do it differently.”
— Steve Jobs
132. “I want to put a ding in the universe.”
— Steve Jobs
133. “We had nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
— Steve Jobs
134. “Everything is important- that success is in the details.”
— Steve Jobs
135. “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”
— Steve Jobs
136. “Follow your heart, but check it with your head.”
— Steve Jobs
137. “We believe people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe. And we believe that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do.”
— Steve Jobs
138. “The were good times, there were hard times, but there were never bad times.”
— Steve Jobs
139. “Everything is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period.”
— Steve Jobs
140. “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”
— Steve Jobs
141. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
— Steve Jobs
142. “Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.”
— Steve Jobs
143. “You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.”
— Steve Jobs
144. “If a user is having a problem, it’s our problem.”
— Steve Jobs
145. “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.”
— Steve Jobs
146. “I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.”
— Steve Jobs
147. “You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
— Steve Jobs
148. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”
— Steve Jobs
149. “If you’re afraid of failing you won’t get very far.”
— Steve Jobs
150. “Don’t settle, as with all matters of the heart you’ll know when you find it.”
— Steve Jobs
151. “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.”
— Steve Jobs
152. “I sat in a garage and invented the future.”
— Steve Jobs
153. “Let’s go invent tomorrow!”
— Steve Jobs
154. “If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust you a lot.”
— Steve Jobs
155. “Some mistakes will be made along the way. That’s good. Because some decisions are being made along the way. We’ll find the mistakes. We’ll fix them.”
— Steve Jobs
156. “Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”
— Steve Jobs
157. “Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview.”
— Steve Jobs
158. “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex.”
— Steve Jobs
159. “I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”
— Steve Jobs
160. “There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind.’ It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.”
— Steve Jobs
161. “Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.”
— Steve Jobs
162. “Without passion, any rational person would give up!”
— Steve Jobs
163. “It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.”
— Steve Jobs
164. “You should never go to a meeting or make a telephone call without a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.”
— Steve Jobs
165. “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
— Steve Jobs
166. “Strategy is figuring out what not to do.”
— Steve Jobs
167. “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
— Steve Jobs
168. “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
— Steve Jobs
169. “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
— Steve Jobs
170. “We all have a short period of time on this earth-We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.”
— Steve Jobs
171. “The real art is knowing what to leave out, not what to put in.”
— Steve Jobs
172. “I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success. I don’t mind being wrong, and I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”
— Steve Jobs
173. “Your customers don’t care about you. They don’t care about your product or service. They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals. Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals, and to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires.”
— Steve Jobs
174. “We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.”
— Steve Jobs
175. “Fear of failure falls away in the face of death.”
— Steve Jobs
176. “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
— Steve Jobs
177. “We’ve got to make the small things unforgettable.”
— Steve Jobs
178. “Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.”
— Steve Jobs
179. “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.”
— Steve Jobs
180. “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.”
— Steve Jobs
181. “This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us.”
— Steve Jobs
182. “Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”
— Steve Jobs
183. “Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.”
— Steve Jobs
184. “Focus is about saying, No. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.”
— Steve Jobs
185. “This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy.”
— Steve Jobs
186. “Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life.”
— Steve Jobs
187. “The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso, and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we’ve got to risk it too.”
— Steve Jobs
188. “Combine science and humanities.”
— Steve Jobs
189. “Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path.”
— Steve Jobs
190. “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs
191. “You are all over the map, figure out the top 5 things you want to focus on and get rid of the rest.”
— Steve Jobs
192. “In your life, you only get to do so many things and right now we’ve chosen to do this, so let’s make it great.”
— Steve Jobs
193. “I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.”
— Steve Jobs
194. “Ask for feedback from people with diverse backgrounds. Each one will tell you one useful thing. If you’re at the top of the chain, sometimes people won’t give you honest feedback because they’re afraid. In this case, disguise yourself, or get feedback from other sources.”
— Steve Jobs
195. “It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
— Steve Jobs
196. “Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.”
— Steve Jobs
197. “Don’t just follow your passion but something larger than yourself.”
— Steve Jobs
198. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
— Steve Jobs
199. “We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.”
— Steve Jobs
200. “To follow the path that others have laid before you is a reasonable course of action; therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.”
— Steve Jobs
