Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Leonardo became known in Milan not only for his talents but also for his good looks, muscular build, and gentle personal style. “He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace,” Vasari said of him. “He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.”

— Walter Isaacson

302. “Leonardo said so himself. “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.”

— Walter Isaacson

303. “You know, one of these things that happened in the ’60s and ’70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture.”

— Walter Isaacson

304. “Who said your job was to think, spring-wiener?”

— Walter Isaacson

305. “Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of his old house.”

— Walter Isaacson

306. “In fact, these terms devised by Franklin are the ones we still use today, along with other neologisms that he coined to describe his findings: battery, charged, neutral, condense, and conductor.”

— Walter Isaacson

307. “One day someone called the Institute and asked to speak to a particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn’t available, the caller hesitantly asked for Einstein’s home address. That was not possible to give out, he was informed. The caller’s voice then dropped to a whisper. “Please don’t tell anybody,” he said, “but I am Dr. Einstein, I’m on my way home, and I’ve forgotten where my house is.”40.”

— Walter Isaacson

308. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

— Walter Isaacson

309. “I’m not sure,” Atkinson replied. “Maybe six months.” It was a wildly optimistic assessment, but also a motivating one.”

— Walter Isaacson

310. “Public awareness is an important component of innovation.”

— Walter Isaacson

311. “Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”

— Walter Isaacson

312. “Suddenly Einstein jumped up. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “Are you boiling the liver in water?” Mrs. Frank allowed that was indeed what she was doing. “The boiling-point of water is too low,” Einstein declared. “You must use a substance with a higher boiling-point such as butter or fat.” From then on, Mrs. Frank referred to the necessity of frying liver as “Einstein’s theory.”

— Walter Isaacson

313. “Franklin was worried that his fondness for conversation and eagerness to impress made him prone to “prattling, punning and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company.” Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.” So in the Junto, he began to work on his use of silence and gentle dialogue.”

— Walter Isaacson

314. “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

315. “Monday, May 27: Memorial Day was sunny and warm.”

— Walter Isaacson

316. “He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance,” recalled Schiller. “That meant design and engineering had to work together.”

— Walter Isaacson

317. “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

318. “He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace,” Vasari said of him. “He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.”

— Walter Isaacson

319. “He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history.”

— Walter Isaacson

320. “Okay, it’s not easy, but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was.”

— Walter Isaacson

321. “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

322. “He was incredibly phony, a complete poseur... He pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn’t. He was a marketing guy, and that is what marketing guys are: paid poseurs.”

— Walter Isaacson

323. “Einstein’s theory produced a law of the photoelectric effect that was experimentally testable: the energy of emitted electrons would depend on the frequency of the light according to a simple mathematical formula involving Planck’s constant.”

— Walter Isaacson

324. “Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn’t quite see it as a conflict between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic but wanting to sell things like Wozniak’s board. Wanting to create a business.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

326. “Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don’t know how it works. They don’t fully understand what I knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination.”8.”

— Walter Isaacson

327. “Leonardo had also been wrestling with the question of why the sky appears blue, and around that time he had correctly concluded that it had to do with the water vapor in the air. In the Saint Anne painting, he portrays the sky’s luminous and misty gradations of blue as no other painter had done. The recent cleaning of the painting fully reveals the magical realism, veiled in vapors, of his distant mountains and skyline.”

— Walter Isaacson

328. “Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science.”

— Walter Isaacson

329. “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

330. “There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.”

— Walter Isaacson

331. “Tolerance of free expression and independence of thought, he repeatedly argued, were the core values that Americans, to his delight, most cherished.”

— Walter Isaacson

332. “I’ve always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.”

— Walter Isaacson

333. “He never really cared too much about mechanical things.”

— Walter Isaacson

334. “The most successful endeavors in the digital age were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision. Too often these are seen as conflicting traits: a leader is either very inclusive or a passionate visionary. But the best leaders could be both. Robert.”

— Walter Isaacson

335. “A pattern was set: try new ideas and be willing to blow things up.”

— Walter Isaacson

336. “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

337. “I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.”

— Walter Isaacson

338. “Her work also illustrates, as Leonardo da Vinci’s did, that the key to innovation is connecting a curiosity about basic science to the practical work of devising tools that can be applied to our lives – moving discoveries from lab bench to bedside.”

— Walter Isaacson

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

342. “A looming ethical issue, everyone at the table agrees, is that gene editing could exacerbate, and even encode, inequality in society.”

— Walter Isaacson

343. “Evite los compartimentos estancos.”

— Walter Isaacson

344. “Because a lot of people think they’re crazy, but in that craziness we see genius.”

— Walter Isaacson

345. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

349. “Baby You’re a Rich Man Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them.”

— Walter Isaacson

350. “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