Steve Jobs

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other's negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts.

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

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.

Things don't have to change the world to be important.

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.

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.

Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right.

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

A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

It's not the customer's job to know what they want.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.

Let's go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

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.

I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.

I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it.

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away.