Top 60 John Maeda Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People who can focus, get things done. People who can prioritize, get the right things done.”

— John Maeda

Featured in: Focus Quotes, Friday Quotes for Work, Positive Work Quotes, Productivity Quotes

2. “If you have no fear, no one has power over you.”

— John Maeda

Featured in: Overcoming Fear Quotes

3. “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”

— John Maeda

4. “Too little confidence, and you’re unable to act; too much confidence, and you’re unable to hear.”

— John Maeda

5. “Technology makes possibilities. Design makes solutions. Art makes questions. Leadership makes actions.”

— John Maeda

6. “Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.”

— John Maeda

7. “Creativity’s about ownership.”

— John Maeda

8. “When you’re younger, think less and do more; when you’re older, do less and think more.”

— John Maeda

9. “Simplicity and complexity need each other.”

— John Maeda

10. “Knowledge makes everything simpler.”

— John Maeda

11. “The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.”

— John Maeda

12. “While great art makes you wonder, great design makes things clear.”

— John Maeda

13. “If you are going to have less things, they have to be great things.”

— John Maeda

14. “Good problem-seekers are in higher demand than good problem-solvers.”

— John Maeda

15. “Knowledge is comfort, and comfort lies at the heart of simplicity.”

— John Maeda

16. “Our economy is built upon convergent thinkers, people that execute things, get them done. But artists and designers are divergent thinkers: they expand the horizon of possibilities.”

— John Maeda

17. “Art shows us that human beings still matter in a world where money talks the loudest, where computers know everything about us, and where robots fabricate our next meal and also our ride there.”

— John Maeda

18. “How do we slow down what matters the most and speed up what benefits change and progress? We don’t want to impede progress, but we are seeking reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and with the world.”

— John Maeda

19. “Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form.”

— John Maeda

20. “Corporations today, by their razor sharp focus on the ‘bottom line’ and quarterly earnings, have lost their ability to innovate.”

— John Maeda

21. “The problem isn’t how to make the world more technological. It’s about how to make the world more humane again.”

— John Maeda

22. “My role is to find strategic insights as to where design can have the most business impact. A designer can bring a viewpoint of not just aesthetics, but economics and usage.”

— John Maeda

23. “Think of the computer as a spiritual space for thinking.”

— John Maeda

24. “The artist needs to understand the truth that lies at the bottom of an enigma.”

— John Maeda

25. “A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together.”

— John Maeda

26. “The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees – to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less.”

— John Maeda

27. “We seem to forget that innovation doesn’t just come from equations or new kinds of chemicals, it comes from a human place. Innovation in the sciences is always linked in some way, either directly or indirectly, to a human experience.”

— John Maeda

28. “Videogames are indeed design: They’re sophisticated virtual machines that echo the mechanical systems inside cars.”

— John Maeda

29. “Artists change how we see the world – and that can have value in the way people do business.”

— John Maeda

30. “As a genre, videogames take our minds on journeys, and we can control and experience them much more interactively than passively – especially when they are well-designed.”

— John Maeda

31. “All artists yearn to struggle, when they struggle they know they’re alive.”

— John Maeda

32. “The best scientists that I’ve met are those that are humanists and scientists at the same time.”

— John Maeda

33. “Being prepared isn’t a matter of how much you practice. It’s about knowing that even if you fail, you won’t give up.”

— John Maeda

34. “Apple products aren’t simple technologies by any stretch, but there is a beautiful simplicity to them.”

— John Maeda

35. “If there were a prerequisite for the future successful digital creative, it would be the passion for discovery.”

— John Maeda

36. “Teaching is the rare profession where the customer isn’t always right and needs to be told so appropriately.”

— John Maeda

37. “All I want to be is, someone that makes, new things and, thinks about them.”

— John Maeda

38. “Design is about crafting an experience that is unfamiliar enough to feel novel, yet familiar enough to instill confidence.”

— John Maeda

39. “Research universities need excellent means to communicate and express their results to regular people.”

— John Maeda

40. “Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn’t know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can’t do myself, my graduate students should be doing.”

— John Maeda

41. “I don’t like creating software anymore. It’s too exact. It’s like karate; there’s no room for error.”

— John Maeda

42. “I have a confession: I’m not a man of simplicity. I spent my entire early career making complex stuff. Lots of complex stuff.”

— John Maeda

43. “I don’t really love computers.”

— John Maeda

44. “I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn’t have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn’t have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.”

— John Maeda

45. “The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.”

— John Maeda

46. “Communication in every which way is everything for the leader.”

— John Maeda

47. “Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.”

— John Maeda

48. “No place in the US better exemplifies the ethos to engineer new digital technologies than Silicon Valley.”

— John Maeda

49. “With regard to what is designed really well, I think people are the best-designed objects in the world. Seriously.”

— John Maeda

50. “In the ’70s and ’80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science.”

— John Maeda