Steve Jobs
1955–2011
10 genuine quotes, each found in the text, and 2 wrongly credited to Jobs.
American entrepreneur who co-founded Apple, left it in 1985, founded NeXT, led Pixar, and returned to run Apple from 1997 until shortly before his death. His public words are mostly keynotes, interviews and the 2005 Stanford commencement address; many lines circulating under his name are Apple advertising copy, spoken by a narrator in Apple’s voice (above all the ‘Think different’ campaign), or sayings he never used.
FrontispieceMade by an image model after Bernard Gotfryd’s photograph of Steve Jobs (1984, public domain), in the manner of bitmap and pixel graphics (1977–1995). The likeness is the original’s; this picture is AI‑generated and not historical. The endpaper behind it is an AI‑generated pattern in the same manner.
Genuine Jobs quotes
- Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Rob Walker, “The Guts of a New Machine”, The New York Times Magazine, 30 November 2003 (“Consumed” column), Paragraph beginning “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like”.
- People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
“Steve Jobs: ‘There’s Sanity Returning’”, Q&A with Andy Reinhardt, Business Week, 25 May 1998 (extended online version, Bloomberg Businessweek), Answer to “Did you do consumer research on the iMac when you were developing it?”.
- Creativity is just connecting things.
Gary Wolf, “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing”, Wired, February 1996 (issue 4.02), GrokKing design section; answer to the question about why more products lack great design.
- 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.
Commencement address at Stanford University (2005), Third story, about death, paragraph beginning “No one wants to die”.
- Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
Steve Jobs, 1994 interview with the Silicon Valley Historical Association, excerpted in Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words, edited by Leslie Berlin (Steve Jobs Archive, 2023), “One More Thing …”, “One More Thing …”, the closing selection in Make Something Wonderful (2023), credited to Steve, 1994.
- Simple can be harder than complex.
“Steve Jobs: ‘There’s Sanity Returning’”, Q&A with Andy Reinhardt, Business Week, 25 May 1998 (extended online version, preserved on Bloomberg), Answer to the follow-up “I’m talking about the symbolic value”, in the discussion of stock ownership.
- Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Commencement address at Stanford University (2005), Closing wish to the graduates, immediately before the final thanks.
- And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
Commencement address at Stanford University (2005), Second story, “love and loss”, final paragraph.
- Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
Commencement address at Stanford University (2005), First story, “connecting the dots”, concluding paragraph.
- Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Commencement address at Stanford University (2005), Third story, about death, paragraph beginning “Your time is limited”.
Quotes wrongly credited to Jobs
- The musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.
Misattributed. Aaron Sorkin wrote it, not Jobs.
- I reached the pinnacle of success in the business world. In others’ eyes, my life is an epitome of success.
Not found. No documented source establishes this as Steve Jobs’s writing or last words. Snopes traced the false attribution to circulation in November 2015; its real author remains unconfirmed.
The works we hold
Quotes are looked up word for word in these texts. The number is how many genuine quotes here come from each.
| Work | Year | Genuine quotes |
|---|---|---|
| Commencement address at Stanford University | 2005 | 5 |