Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Buddhism, was not just some passing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his typical intensity, and it became deeply ingrained in his personality. “Steve is very much Zen,” said Kottke. “It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense.”

— Walter Isaacson

452. “He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water-jar.”

— Walter Isaacson

453. “But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.”

— Walter Isaacson

454. “The first intention of the painter,” Leonardo later wrote, “is to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane, and he who surpasses others in this skill deserves most praise. This accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned, arises from light and shade, or we may say chiaroscuro.”30 That statement could stand as his artistic manifesto, or at least a key element of.”

— Walter Isaacson

455. “Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process, and every specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong.”

— Walter Isaacson

456. “Einstein’s 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science’s best known equation.”

— Walter Isaacson

457. “Hume saw clearly that certain concepts, for example that of causality, cannot be deduced from our perceptions of experience by logical methods,” Einstein noted. A version of this philosophy, sometimes called positivism, denied the validity of any concepts that went beyond descriptions of phenomena that we directly experience.”

— Walter Isaacson

458. “At a meeting early in his tenure, Cook was told of a problem with one of Apple’s Chinese suppliers. “This is really bad,” he said. “Someone should be in China driving this.”

— Walter Isaacson

459. “Leonardo was experimenting with the trick known as anamorphosis, in which some elements of a work may look distorted when viewed straight on but appear accurate when viewed from another angle. Leonardo occasionally made sketches of the technique in his notebooks.”

— Walter Isaacson

460. “If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.” This.”

— Walter Isaacson

461. “The digital age could not become truly transformational until computers became truly personal.”

— Walter Isaacson

462. “Oddest of all, there is this entry: “Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men.”10 We can imagine Leonardo wanting to do.”

— Walter Isaacson

463. “Reality is unforgiving.”

— Walter Isaacson

464. “The first half of the twentieth century, beginning with Albert Einstein’s 1905 papers on relativity and quantum theory, featured a revolution driven by physics.”

— Walter Isaacson

465. “One was how computers could be networked; the second was how object-oriented programming worked.”

— Walter Isaacson

466. “People like you and me never grow old,” he wrote a friend later in life. “We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”

— Walter Isaacson

467. “Ethernet, the technologies developed by Bob Metcalfe.”

— Walter Isaacson

468. “In collecting such a medley of ideas, Leonardo was following a practice that had become popular in Renaissance Italy of keeping a commonplace and sketch book, known as a zibaldone. But in their content, Leonardo’s were like nothing the world had ever, or has ever, seen. His notebooks have been rightly called “the most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper.”3.”

— Walter Isaacson

469. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

— Walter Isaacson

470. “The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions,” he wrote a Brooklyn minister. “Our inner balance and even our existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.”25 The foundation of that morality, he believed, was rising above the “merely personal” to live in a way that benefited humanity.”

— Walter Isaacson

471. “The Mac, on the other hand, would end up being as “insanely great” as Jobs and his acolytes could possibly make it – but it would not ship for another sixteen months, way behind schedule.”

— Walter Isaacson

472. “V – the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king – begins.”

— Walter Isaacson

473. “He said that he would always harbor affection for Apple. “I’ll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he’s fallen in love with.”

— Walter Isaacson

474. “One moral issue that continues to loom large for her is inequality, especially if the wealthy are able to buy genetic enhancements for their children. “We could create a gene gap that would get wider with each new generation,” she says. “If you think we face inequalities now, imagine what it would be like if society became genetically tiered along economic lines and we transcribed our financial inequality into our genetic code.”

— Walter Isaacson

475. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. – Steve Jobs.”

— Walter Isaacson

476. “Apple’s innovations were more than skin-deep. Since 1994 it had been using a microprocessor, called the PowerPC, that was.”

— Walter Isaacson

477. “Here is our gentle and beloved Leonardo, who became a vegetarian because of his fondness for all creatures, wallowing in horrifying depictions of death.”

— Walter Isaacson

478. “His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.” Markkula.”

— Walter Isaacson

479. “There was also the issue of his hygiene. He was still convinced, against all evidence, that his vegan diets meant that he didn’t need to use a deodorant or take regular showers. “We would have to literally put him out the door and tell him to go take a shower,” said Markkula. “At meetings we had to look at his dirty feet.” Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues.”

— Walter Isaacson

480. “Art Levinson, who was on Apple’s board, was chairing the board meeting of his own company, Genentech, when his cell phone rang and Jobs’s name appeared on the screen. As soon as there was a break, Levinson called him back and heard the news of the tumor. He had a background in cancer biology, and his firm made cancer treatment drugs, so he became an advisor. So did Andy Grove of Intel, who had fought and beaten prostate cancer. Jobs called him that Sunday, and he drove.”

— Walter Isaacson

481. “His wife also did not request any restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest.”

— Walter Isaacson

482. “Knowing when to stand firm on principle or when to find common ground with your fellow citizens is the most important, and also the most difficult, activity in a democracy. There’s no simple formula for it. That is why it is so useful to have narratives...”

— Walter Isaacson

483. “Nature is beautiful.”

— Walter Isaacson

484. “Hey, if we’re going to make things in our life, we might as well make them beautiful.”

— Walter Isaacson

485. “When mastering drapery drawings in Verrocchio’s studio, Leonardo also pioneered sfumato, the technique of blurring contours and edges. It is a way for artists to render objects as they appear to our eye rather than with sharp contours. This advance caused Vasari to proclaim Leonardo the inventor of the “modern manner” in painting, and the art historian Ernst Gombrich called sfumato “Leonardo’s famous invention, the blurred outline and mellowed colors that allow one form.”

— Walter Isaacson

486. “For the fashionable gentlemen of the aristocracy, elegant eating and gambling clubs, such as White’s and later Brookes’s and Boodle’s, were starting to spring up in St. James’s. For the burgeoning new class of writers, journalists, professionals, and intellectuals whose company Franklin preferred, there were the coffeehouses.”

— Walter Isaacson

487. “Jobs flew down to have lunch with Eisner, who was stunned at his audacity. They had a three-picture deal, and Pixar had made only one. Each side had its own nuclear weapons.”

— Walter Isaacson

488. “When the fermentation is over and the troubling parts subsided, the wine will be fine and good, and cheer the hearts of those that drink it.”41 Franklin was wrong, sadly wrong, about the French Revolution, though he would not live long enough to learn it. Le Veillard would soon lose his life to the guillotine. So would Lavoisier the chemist, who had worked with him on the Mesmer investigation. Condorcet, the economist who had accompanied.”

— Walter Isaacson

489. “The second half of the twentieth century was an information-technology era, based on the idea that all information could be encoded by binary digits – known as bits – and all logical processes could be performed by circuits with on-off switches.”

— Walter Isaacson

490. “Thus was born the iPod, the device that would begin the transformation of Apple from being a computer maker into being the world’s most valuable company.”

— Walter Isaacson

491. “Good authors copy, great artists steal”-Picassco.”

— Walter Isaacson

492. “Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.”49.”

— Walter Isaacson

493. “One weekend Jobs was visiting Wayne at his apartment, engaging as they often did in philosophical discussions, when Wayne said that there was something he needed to tell him. “Yeah, I think I know what it is,” Jobs replied. “I think you like men.” Wayne said yes. “It was my first encounter with someone who I knew was gay,” Jobs recalled.”

— Walter Isaacson

494. “Retain a childlike sense of wonder.”

— Walter Isaacson

495. “Wielding imaging techniques such as X-ray crystallography, which is what Rosalind Franklin used to find evidence of the structure of DNA, structural biologists try to discover the three-dimensional shape of molecules. Linus Pauling worked out the spiral structure of proteins in the early 1950s, which was followed by Watson and Crick’s paper on the double-helix structure of DNA.”

— Walter Isaacson

496. “If your hand is on a stove and it gets hot, you pull it right off, but if it’s someone else’s hand on the stove, it will take you longer to do something.”

— Walter Isaacson

497. “If you were negative or thought something couldn’t be done, you were not invited to the next meeting,” Mueller recalls. “He just wanted people who would make things happen.” It was a good way to drive people to do what they thought was impossible. But it was also a good way to become surrounded by people afraid to give you bad news or question a decision.”

— Walter Isaacson

498. “Adolf Hitler polled highest as the “greatest living person.” Albert Einstein was second.”

— Walter Isaacson

499. “Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel. So Johnson sent his first five store managers through the Ritz-Carlton training.”

— Walter Isaacson

500. “Another way to describe the Second Law is in terms of entropy, the degree of disorder and randomness in a system. Any spontaneous process tends to increase the entropy of a system.”

— Walter Isaacson