Walter Isaacson Quotes

"One of Job's great strengths was knowing how to focus. " Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do, " he said. " That's true for companies, and it's true for products.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, he [Einstein] said.

The sexual act of coitus and the body parts employed for it are so repulsive that, if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornment of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.

Step one should be to question the requirements,” he says. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.

innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

In addition to his instinct for discerning patterns across disciplines, Leonardo honed two other traits that aided his scientific pursuits: an omnivorous curiosity, which bordered on the fanatical, and an acute power of observation, which was eerily intense. Like much with Leonardo, these were interconnected. Any person who puts “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker” on his to-do list is overendowed with the combination of curiosity and acuity. His curiosity, like that of Einstein, often was about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about: Why is the sky blue? How are clouds formed? Why can our eyes see only in a straight line? What is yawning? Einstein said he marveled about questions others found mundane because he was slow in learning to talk as a child. For Leonardo, this talent may have been connected to growing up with a love of nature while not being overly schooled in received wisdom.

"One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him."

"Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. " My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugar coat it, : he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also,, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.

Form follows emotion

One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it. We can see that in Leonardo. As he wrestled with his earth and water studies during the early 1500s, he ran into evidence that caused him to revise his belief in the microcosm-macrocosm analogy. It was Leonardo at his best, and we have the great fortune of being able to watch that evolution as he wrote the Codex Leicester. There he engaged in a dialogue between theories and experience, and when they conflicted he was receptive to trying a new theory. That willingness to surrender preconceptions was key to his creativity.

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that.” Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts.

In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.

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.