Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Leonardo said so himself. “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.”

— Walter Isaacson

302. “Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people.”

— Walter Isaacson

303. “Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it’s better.”12.”

— Walter Isaacson

304. “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word.”

— Walter Isaacson

305. “Gates was the prime example of the innovator’s personality. “An innovator is probably a fanatic, somebody who loves what they do, works day and night, may ignore normal things to some degree and therefore be viewed as a bit imbalanced,” he said. “Certainly in my teens and 20s, I fit that model.”

— Walter Isaacson

306. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. – Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997.”

— Walter Isaacson

307. “I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

— Walter Isaacson

308. “Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I don’t know that way, because I am middle class from California.”

— Walter Isaacson

309. “Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong.”

— Walter Isaacson

310. “Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, were “selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”

— Walter Isaacson

311. “The Jew who abandons his faith,” he once said, “is in a similar position to a snail that abandons his shell. He is still a snail.”68.”

— Walter Isaacson

312. “Closely related are the entries in his bestiary, a compendium of short tales of animals and moral lessons based on their traits. Bestiaries were popular among the ancients and in the Middle Ages, and the spread of printing presses meant that many were reprinted in Italy beginning in the 1470s. Leonardo had a copy of the bestiary written by Pliny the Elder and three others by medieval compilers.”

— Walter Isaacson

313. “Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a company in nearby Santa Clara that made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers were devising. His son was fascinated by the.”

— Walter Isaacson

314. “By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox’s $1 million worth of shares were worth $17.6 million. But Apple got the better end of the bargain. Jobs and his colleagues went to see Xerox PARC’s technology in December 1979 and, when Jobs realized he hadn’t been shown enough, got an even fuller demonstration a few days later. Larry Tesler was one of the Xerox scientists called.”

— Walter Isaacson

315. “Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought,” Wiener wrote. “This is not the case.”14 The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking.”

— Walter Isaacson

316. “Great inventions come from understanding basic science. Nature is beautiful that way.”

— Walter Isaacson

317. “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.”

— Walter Isaacson

318. “In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers.”

— Walter Isaacson

319. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. The artful minimalism of the speech gave it simplicity, purity, and charm.”

— Walter Isaacson

320. “Grove’s mantra was “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” Noyce and Moore may not have been paranoid, but they were never complacent.”

— Walter Isaacson

321. “There was harmony in proportions, Leonardo learned, and math was nature’s brushstroke.”

— Walter Isaacson

322. “If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.”

— Walter Isaacson

323. “Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women: “Despite our coming of age in an era when women’s career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer.”

— Walter Isaacson

324. “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry,” Larry Ellison said. “There are cars people are proud to have – Porsche, Ferrari, Prius – because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product.” Starting.”

— Walter Isaacson

325. “The Apple Marketing Philosophy.”

— Walter Isaacson

326. “He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair.”

— Walter Isaacson

327. “Be open to mystery. Not everything needs sharp lines.”

— Walter Isaacson

328. “Jobs’s father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough. This.”

— Walter Isaacson

329. “Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.”

— Walter Isaacson

330. “When people take insights from multiple sources and put them together, it’s natural for them to think that the resulting ideas are their own – as.”

— Walter Isaacson

331. “The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously – carefully.”

— Walter Isaacson

332. “That’s why I’m here to kiss the corporate ass. I don’t kiss everybody’s.”

— Walter Isaacson

333. “The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.”

— Walter Isaacson

334. “I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.”

— Walter Isaacson

335. “They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.”

— Walter Isaacson

336. “The following year, students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, which were not yet connected to the Internet, developed another system, hosted on personal computers, which featured threaded message-and-reply discussion forums. It became known as “Usenet,” and the categories of postings on it were called “newsgroups.”

— Walter Isaacson

337. “The computer will never be as important to society as the copier.”73.”

— Walter Isaacson

338. “One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to heed them.”

— Walter Isaacson

339. “Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.”

— Walter Isaacson

340. “Embora eu achasse que estivesse aprendendo a viver, eu estava aprendendo a morrer.”48.”

— Walter Isaacson

341. “Einstein’s detachment allowed him to affect an air of amusement rather than anxiety. “The whole affair is a matter of indifference to me, as is all the commotion, and the opinion of each and every human being,” he said. “I will live through all that is in store for me like an unconcerned spectator.”

— Walter Isaacson

342. “Sometimes it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.”

— Walter Isaacson

343. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

— Walter Isaacson

344. “I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.”

— Walter Isaacson

345. “Though human ingenuity may make various inventions,” he wrote, “it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”

— Walter Isaacson

346. “La naturaleza adora la sencillez y la unidad.”

— Walter Isaacson

347. “Plato inscribed over the door of his Academy: “Let no one who is not a mathematician read my work.”

— Walter Isaacson

348. “Retain a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life, most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”5 We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.”

— Walter Isaacson

349. “The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.”

— Walter Isaacson

350. “Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.”

— Walter Isaacson