Top 500 Walter Isaacson Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Evite los compartimentos estancos.”

— Walter Isaacson

352. “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

353. “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

354. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” Gates’s.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Walter Isaacson

363. “The branches of the leafless tree merge into the man’s body, then into the conical geometrical pattern, and finally into the mountainous landscape. What Leonardo probably began as four distinct elements ended up woven together in a way that illustrates a fundamental theme in his art and science: the interconnectedness of nature, the unity of its patterns, and the analogy between the workings of the human body and those of the earth.”

— Walter Isaacson

364. “Einstein later said, “it made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority.”57.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

366. “Ingenuity without wisdom is dangerous.”

— Walter Isaacson

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as he did.”

— Walter Isaacson

371. “Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

— Walter Isaacson

372. “I will a little tink.”

— Walter Isaacson

373. “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

374. “Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself.”

— Walter Isaacson

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “At the age of 31, he had five children to raise, a trade to tend, and a shop to keep. He needed a robust new wife, and he needed her quickly.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “Another assessment, also sometimes endorsed by Jobs, is that what transpired was less a heist by Apple than a fumble by Xerox. “They were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do,” he said of Xerox’s management. “They just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could.”

— Walter Isaacson

388. “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

389. “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

390. “The central area of the retina, known as the fovea, is best at seeing color and small details; the area surrounding the fovea is best at picking up shadows and shadings of black and white. When we look at an object straight on, it appears sharper. When we look at it peripherally, glimpsing it out of the corner of our eye, it is a bit blurred, as if it were farther away.”

— Walter Isaacson

391. “In fact, neither explanation does Jobs and Apple justice. As the case of the forgotten Iowa inventor John Atanasoff shows, conception is just the first step. What really matters is execution. Jobs and his team took Xerox’s ideas, improved them, implemented them, and marketed them.”

— Walter Isaacson

392. “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

393. “I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer,” he said. “The people who buy them do think different. They are the creative spirits in this world, and they’re out to change the world. We make tools for those kinds of people.”

— Walter Isaacson

394. “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

395. “When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for having thought that.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

397. “We must remember that this is a very small star,” he responded, “and probably some of the larger and more important stars may be very virtuous and happy.”73.”

— Walter Isaacson

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

— Walter Isaacson

399. “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

400. “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