If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.

The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.

In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish something.

Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

The hole and the patch should be commensurate.

In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Don’t read what they write about you, just measure it in inches.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing.

The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.

Every one of us has learned how to send emails on Sunday night. But how many of us know how to go a movie on Monday afternoon. You’ve unbalanced your life without balancing it with someone else.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but illusion of knowledge.

You know long it takes to do simple? About ten times longer than fast and dirty.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student.

The real fortunes in this country have been made by people who have been right about the business they invested in, and not right about the timing of the stock market.

In the hopes of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”

Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

You can accomplish anything you want in life provided you don’t mind who gets the credit.

The cynics may be proved right; they usually are. [From “Resign, Rumsfeld,” May 8, 2004.]

If the search is for examples that contradict the predictions of standard economic models, a good rule of thumb is to start in France.

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s good that we have museums to document them.

The Red Herring: Is [Pixar] a hits business, then?
Steve Jobs: Oh, absolutely. But I will put forth my theory to you, because, of course, I get asked this question a lot. My response is very simple—I can only look back at my own history. The Apple 2 was a hit. The Apple 3 was a miss. Lisa was a miss. The Macintosh was a hit. Silicon Valley is a hits business. It’s no less of a hits business than I see in the film business. At least Pixar’s second film doesn’t have to be backwards compatible with its first. So that’s my answer. Life is a hits business as best as I can tell.

A videogame aficionado interviewed for J.C. Herz’s book “Joystick Nation” complains: “Nowadays, there’s no imagination required, the realism is so advanced.”

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

Don’t hire a dog, and then bark yourself.

When Chuck House wanted to develop the oscilloscope for HP, David Packard told him to abandon the project. Chuck went on “vacation” and came back with $2MM in orders. Packard later gave him an award inscribed with an accolade for “extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering.”

The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.

As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Remember what the fellow said: In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. And in Switzerland they had brotherly love and 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

All good work is done in defiance of management.

Put one dumb foot in front of the other and course-correct as you go.

A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked….A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

A good plan violently executed today, is far and away better than a perfect plan next week.

People who boast about their IQ are losers.

If you don’t love others you can’t cook. People who have no love to share eat poorly, and they don’t cook. If you love cooking, you will cook, at whatever level. People who like to be around a table, who like to share—they’ll try to cook, even if it’s only an egg. I would much prefer to eat an egg with friends than caviar with strangers.

Well done is better than well said.

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