Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Plato inscribed over the door of his Academy: “Let no one who is not a mathematician read my work.”

— Walter Isaacson

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “Ingenuity without wisdom is dangerous.”

— Walter Isaacson

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

365. “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

366. “Jobs quoted Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” He added, “And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

— Walter Isaacson

367. “To him, marriage was confining, which was a state he instinctively resisted.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

370. “By 1940 Grace Hopper was bored. She had no children, her marriage was unexciting, and teaching math was not as fulfilling as she had hoped.”

— Walter Isaacson

371. “It was by all accounts a pleasant Atlantic crossing, during which Einstein tried to explain relativity to Weissmann. Asked upon their arrival whether he understood the theory, Weissmann gave a delightful reply. “During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.”

— Walter Isaacson

372. “It made me cringe, but dammit, it got things done.”

— Walter Isaacson

373. “Looking back at a century that will be remembered for its willingness to break classical bonds, and looking ahead to an era that seeks to nurture the creativity needed for scientific innovation, one person stands out as a paramount icon of our age: the kindly refugee from oppression whose wild halo of hair, twinkling eyes, engaging humanity, and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius.”

— Walter Isaacson

374. “Micro-Soft BASIC: Paul Allen wrote the non-runtime stuff. Bill Gates wrote the runtime stuff. Monte Davidoff wrote the math package.”

— Walter Isaacson

375. “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

376. “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 away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.”

— Walter Isaacson

377. “The Pepsi Generation campaign, he said, sold not a product but a lifestyle and an optimistic outlook.”

— Walter Isaacson

378. “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

379. “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

380. “I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will.”

— Walter Isaacson

381. “When I look into most people’s eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.”

— Walter Isaacson

382. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

385. “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

386. “I will a little tink.”

— Walter Isaacson

387. “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

388. “Steve Jobs was famously stubborn and.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

390. “Einstein had a similar conversation with his friend in Prague, Philipp Frank. “A new fashion has arisen in physics,” Einstein complained, which declares that certain things cannot be observed and therefore should not be ascribed reality. “But the fashion you speak of,” Frank protested, “was invented by you in 1905!” Replied Einstein: “A good joke should not be repeated too often.”61 The.”

— Walter Isaacson

391. “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

392. “Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “Let me tell you a story.” Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story.”

— Walter Isaacson

393. “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea,” he once told a student. “If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”

— Walter Isaacson

394. “It was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal computer. “It was the first time in history,” Wozniak later said, “anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”

— Walter Isaacson

395. “Even at a young age Lisa began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which asceticism and minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. “He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t know: Things led to their opposites.”

— Walter Isaacson

396. “Being “disputatious,” he concluded, was “a very bad habit” because contradicting people produced “disgusts and perhaps enmities.”

— Walter Isaacson

397. “Put off this sloth,” the master said, “for shame! Sitting on feather-pillows, lying reclined Beneath the blanket is no way to fame – Fame, without which man’s life wastes out of mind, Leaving on earth no more memorial Than foam in water or smoke upon the wind.”

— Walter Isaacson

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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