Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because 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. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

Innovation is the distinction between a leader and a follower.

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. Summer 1993.

It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right. From his speech at Stanford University during graduation in the spring of 2005.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Our friends up north (Microsoft) spend over five billion dollars on research and development and all they seem to do is copy Google and Apple. WWDC, August 2006.

You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.

I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year.... It's very character-building.

You think it's a conspiracy by the networks to put bad shows on TV. But the shows are bad because that's what people want. It's not like Windows users don't have any power. I think they are happy with Windows, and that's an incredibly depressing thought.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world? The line he used to lure John Sculley from PepsiCo as Apple's CEO.

I wish him [Bill Gates] the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates. Oct. 29, 2001.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. 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.

I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to [learn calligraphy]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful. Historical. Artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I found it fascinating. None of this had any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on. (February 2004)

I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success - I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.

You know, we don't grow most of the food we eat. We wear clothes other people make. We speak a language that other people developed. We use a mathematics that other people evolved... I mean, we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.

This is a favourite of mine: Wikipedia. For those of you who don't know: This is an Open Source encyclopedia where everybody contributes to it. It has now become one of the most robust and certainly accurate encyclopedias in the world because you got experts from all over the world contributing to it. And we just look up "tiger" in here, and you get the low-down on all kinds of tigers. So that's Wikipedia and it's great.

The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore! On Gil Amelio's lackluster reign, July 1997.

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

I want a mouse for $10 that can be mass-produced, because it’s going to be the primary interface of the computer of the future. Statement after visiting PARC in 1980.