Well, I was thrown out of school a few times.

Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.

The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person. 

I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done

In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however you define it

You have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.

Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.

I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out ok.

I do not adopt softness towards others because I want to make them better.

You can build your own things that other people can use. And once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

That’s why we started Apple, we said you know, we have absolutely nothing to lose. I was 20 years old at the time, Woz was 24-25, so we have nothing to lose. We have no families, no children, no houses. Woz had an old car. I had a Volkswagen van, I mean, all we were going to lose is our cars and the shirts off our back.

I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young, when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.

I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young, when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.

I don’t care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity

The most precious thing that we all have with us is time

We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.

On the blue box: That was what we learned: was that us, too, we didn’t know much. We could build a little thing that could control a giant thing and that was an incredible lesson.

Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart.

Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint

We were really working fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. For like, two years, three years. That was our life. But we loved it, we were young, and we could do it.

You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

People judge you on your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’.

It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.

Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

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.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.

Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new.

I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young.

Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.

Without death, there would be very little progress.

You get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.

At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough and it consumes your life.

If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up.

You’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about, otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.

I’ve read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he means because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can’t do it forever, and you don’t want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.