text: Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

source: Stanford commencement address

provenance: verified

context: Third story (death) of the Stanford speech.


text: Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

context: Immediately follows q001 in the speech.


text: The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

context: Second story (love and loss).


text: You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

context: First story (connecting the dots), after the calligraphy anecdote.


text: I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

context: Second story, on the 1985 ouster.


text: Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

context: Second story.


text: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

context: Closing words — he is quoting the farewell message of the Whole Earth Catalog, and says so in the speech; not his own coinage.


text: Real artists ship.

source: Macintosh development, via Frank Rose, West of Eden

context: Mac-team rallying cry, 1983–84.


text: We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make 'me too' products.

source: Playboy interview

context: On the Macintosh bet.


text: Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

source: Recruiting pitch to John Sculley

context: As recounted in Sculley's Odyssey; date approximate.


text: It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

source: Apple retreat

context: To the Mac team; date approximate (September 1982 retreat).


text: Creativity is just connecting things.

source: Wired interview

context: From 'Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing.'


text: We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It's pretty great.

source: WWDC keynote

context: Closing sentiment, WWDC 2004.


text: I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this.

source: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (biography)

context: Said to Isaacson after the Nexus One launch; date approximate.


text: It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.

context: Said at age 29; ironic in light of his post-40 run.


text: Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

source: The New York Times, 'The Guts of a New Machine'

provenance: model-memory

context: iPod profile by Rob Walker; Wikiquote lists only the truncated second sentence.


text: It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

source: BusinessWeek interview

context: The canonical anti-focus-group statement.


text: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

source: WWDC keynote / Apple Worldwide Developers Conference

context: Composite frequently dated to the 1997 fireside chat; exact wording and occasion need verification.


text: Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.


text: 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.

source: The Wall Street Journal

context: Wikiquote lists a truncated form; full wording needs verification.


text: Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

context: Stanford's site blocked fetch this session; transcript at the URL.


text: 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.


text: If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.

context: He presents it as a quote he read at seventeen, source unnamed.


text: You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.


text: The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.

context: On the years after the 1985 firing.


text: 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.


text: Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.


text: For the past 33 years, 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.


text: Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.

context: Immediately precedes q003 in the speech.


text: What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

source: Memory & Imagination (documentary interview)

context: The bicycle-for-the-mind framing; he used variants from 1980 onward. Wording varies by occasion.


text: 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.

source: Santa Clara Valley Historical Association interview

context: From the 1994 'secret of life' interview clip.


text: The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.

source: Triumph of the Nerds (PBS) / Robert X. Cringely interview

context: From the 1995 interview later released as 'The Lost Interview.'


text: Picasso had a saying — 'good artists copy, great artists steal' — and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

context: The Picasso attribution is itself apocryphal (Wikiquote lists it under misattributed); Jobs's use of it is real.


text: 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.

context: Same interview as q017.


text: That's been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity.

context: Immediately precedes q034.


text: It's not the consumers' job to know what they want.

source: Fortune interview

context: Late restatement of the anti-focus-group principle.


text: We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.

source: Fortune

context: On the Mac OS X Aqua interface.


text: 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 try to sell it.

source: WWDC fireside chat

context: Part of his answer to a hostile developer question; the full exchange is the canonical concession-then-reassert moment.


text: If you keep your eye on the profit, you're going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.

context: Paraphrasing the lesson he took from watching Apple and HP decline.


text: My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: Great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.

source: 60 Minutes interview

context: Date approximate; the Beatles analogy recurs across late interviews.


text: Technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.

source: iPad 2 launch keynote

context: His penultimate keynote; the intersection-of-streets slide.


text: I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

source: Newsweek

context: Widely dated to a 2001 Newsweek piece; needs primary verification.


text: The journey is the reward.

source: Macintosh-era team slogan

context: Mac-team maxim attributed to Jobs; also the title of a 1987 biography.


text: We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?

source: Attributed, 1980s

context: Ubiquitously quoted; no clean primary source — treat cautiously, possibly a paraphrase that calcified.


text: 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.

source: NBC Nightly News interview


text: 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.

source: Inc. magazine, 'The Entrepreneur of the Decade'


text: I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

source: Smithsonian Institution oral history interview

context: From the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards oral history.


text: If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will.

source: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (biography)

context: Stated as his rationale for the iPhone eating the iPod.


text: We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.

context: Same interview as q036.


text: I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.

source: Wired interview

context: Same piece as q012.


text: The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!

source: BusinessWeek

context: On Apple's mid-90s product line, around his return; date approximate.


text: I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back.

source: Playboy interview

context: Said months before the ouster; eerily prophetic.


text: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people — as remarkable as the telephone.

context: A decade before the consumer internet.


text: You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it's humorous, all the attention to it, because it's hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that's happened to me.

context: On being worth hundreds of millions at 29.


text: We're not perfect. Phones aren't perfect. We want to make all our users happy.

source: iPhone 4 'antennagate' press conference

context: Opening posture of the antenna press conference; wording from memory of the event.