Steve Jobs was the co-founder of Apple Inc. and one of the most influential figures in technology and business history. This list of the best Steve Jobs quotes covers his thoughts on success, innovation, life, and death.

Best Steve Jobs Quotes of All Time

• “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” — Steve Jobs
• “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” — Steve Jobs
• “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” — Steve Jobs
• “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
• “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs
• “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.” — Steve Jobs
• “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me.” — Steve Jobs
• “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” — Steve Jobs
• “I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.” — Steve Jobs
• “The doers are the major thinkers.” — Steve Jobs
• “You have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” — Steve Jobs
• “Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” — Steve Jobs
• “Get closer than ever to your customers.” — Steve Jobs
• “I don’t care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing.” — Steve Jobs
• “Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.” — Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs Quotes on Success and Business

• “You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich.” — Steve Jobs
• “The greatest people are self-managing.” — Steve Jobs
• “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do.” — Steve Jobs
• “My job is to make sure the top 100 people are A+ players.” — Steve Jobs
• “The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.” — Steve Jobs
• “We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.” — Steve Jobs
• “Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack.” — Steve Jobs
• “My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.” — Steve Jobs
• “I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things.” — Steve Jobs
• “I never did it for the money.” — Steve Jobs
• “There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.” — Steve Jobs
• “We don’t hire consultants. We just want to make great products.” — Steve Jobs
• “One home run is much better than two doubles.” — Steve Jobs
• “We just can’t ship junk.” — Steve Jobs
• “Companies lose their vision when middle management piles up.” — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes on Innovation and Creativity

• “Creativity is just connecting things.” — Steve Jobs
• “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have.” — Steve Jobs
• “It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have.” — Steve Jobs
• “I have always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes.” — Steve Jobs
• “You always have to keep pushing to innovate.” — Steve Jobs
• “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.” — Steve Jobs
• “It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.” — Steve Jobs
• “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs
• “Simple can be harder than complex.” — Steve Jobs
• “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” — Steve Jobs
• “Focusing is about saying no.” — Steve Jobs
• “Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain.” — Steve Jobs
• “A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet.” — Steve Jobs
• “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” — Steve Jobs
• “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes on Life and Purpose

• “That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it.” — Steve Jobs
• “The only thing you have in your life is time.” — Steve Jobs
• “Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact.” — Steve Jobs
• “Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” — Steve Jobs
• “I think the things you most regret in life are things you didn’t do.” — Steve Jobs
• “It’s more important to be engaged in the present.” — Steve Jobs
• “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” — Steve Jobs
• “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” — Steve Jobs
• “There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs
• “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life.” — Steve Jobs
• “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” — Steve Jobs
• “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle.” — Steve Jobs
• “We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. Instead, we’ve chosen this.” — Steve Jobs
• “My favorite things in life don’t cost any money.” — Steve Jobs
• “It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.” — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes on Death and Mortality

• “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.” — Steve Jobs
• “Death is the destination we all share.” — Steve Jobs
• “Death is very likely the single best invention of life.” — Steve Jobs
• “It is life’s change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new.” — Steve Jobs
• “Without death, there would be very little progress.” — Steve Jobs
• “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.” — Steve Jobs
• “Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death.” — Steve Jobs
• “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” — Steve Jobs
• “You are already naked.” — Steve Jobs
• “When you die, it doesn’t just all disappear.” — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes on Perseverance and Failure

• “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” — Steve Jobs
• “You get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.” — Steve Jobs
• “If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.” — Steve Jobs
• “You’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about.” — Steve Jobs
• “Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.” — Steve Jobs
• “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.” — Steve Jobs
• “It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” — Steve Jobs
• “Life goes on and you learn from it.” — Steve Jobs
• “You’ve got to be willing to fail, you’ve got to be ready to crash and burn.” — Steve Jobs
• “If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.” — Steve Jobs
• “Pixar has been a marathon, not a sprint.” — Steve Jobs
• “I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.” — Steve Jobs
• “Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask.” — Steve Jobs
• “It’s really hard, and you have to do it over a sustained period of time.” — Steve Jobs
• “None of us wanted to release it at the end.” — Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs Quotes on Marketing and Branding

• “To me, marketing is about values.” — Steve Jobs
• “The only chance we have of communicating is with a feeling.” — Steve Jobs
• “The best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is Nike.” — Steve Jobs
• “Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. And yet, when you think of Nike, you feel something different.” — Steve Jobs
• “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them.” — Steve Jobs
• “By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” — Steve Jobs
• “The most powerful person in business is the storyteller.” — Steve Jobs
• “We have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.” — Steve Jobs
• “It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people.” — Steve Jobs
• “We figure out what we want.” — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quotes From the Stanford Commencement Speech

• “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” — Steve Jobs
• “Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” — Steve Jobs
• “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” — Steve Jobs
• “They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” — Steve Jobs
• “I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.” — Steve Jobs
• “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.” — Steve Jobs
• “You’ve got to find what you love.” — Steve Jobs
• “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” — Steve Jobs
• “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” — Steve Jobs
• “Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs Quotes on Apple and Technology

• “Apple is about people who think outside the box.” — Steve Jobs
• “What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with.” — Steve Jobs
• “It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” — Steve Jobs
• “We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off.” — Steve Jobs
• “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer.” — Steve Jobs
• “Apple’s the only company left in this industry that designs the whole widget.” — Steve Jobs
• “We’re going to reinvent the phone.” — Steve Jobs
• “One of the things that made Apple great was that, in the early days, it was built from the heart.” — Steve Jobs
• “The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations.” — Steve Jobs
• “I want to make a phone that people love.” — Steve Jobs
• “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.” — Steve Jobs
• “We won because we personally love music.” — Steve Jobs
• “Three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do.” — Steve Jobs

Short Steve Jobs Quotes for 2026

• “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” — Steve Jobs
• “Creativity is just connecting things.” — Steve Jobs
• “Focusing is about saying no.” — Steve Jobs
• “The doers are the major thinkers.” — Steve Jobs
• “Life goes on and you learn from it.” — Steve Jobs
• “If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.” — Steve Jobs
• “You are already naked.” — Steve Jobs
• “Quality is more important than quantity.” — Steve Jobs
• “We just can’t ship junk.” — Steve Jobs
• “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.” — Steve Jobs
• “Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs
• “The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.” — Steve Jobs
• “You have to trust in something.” — Steve Jobs
• “There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs
• “Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” — Steve Jobs

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FAQ’s About Steve Jobs Quotes

What is Steve Jobs’ most famous quote?

“Stay hungry, stay foolish” is widely considered his most famous quote.

What did Steve Jobs say about death?

He called death “life’s change agent” that clears the old to make way for the new.

What was Steve Jobs’ philosophy on life?

He believed life should be lived on your own terms, not shaped by others’ expectations.

Where is the “Stay hungry, stay foolish” quote from?

It comes from his 2005 Stanford commencement speech.

What were Steve Jobs’ last words?

His reported last words were “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

What did Steve Jobs say about passion?

He said you must love what you do or you will eventually fail at it.

How many public quotes did Steve Jobs leave behind?

Hundreds, spanning speeches, interviews, product launches, and shareholder meetings.

What can entrepreneurs learn from Steve Jobs today?

To focus on simplicity, quality, and building products people truly love.

Final Thoughts

Steve Jobs left behind a legacy of simplicity, passion, and relentless focus. His words continue to guide entrepreneurs, designers, and everyday readers in 2026. These quotes remain a lasting source of motivation and clarity.

Oliver Sinclair

I’m Oliver Sinclair, founder of NarcissistQuote.com. I’m passionate about sharing narcissist quotes, healing quotes, and inspirational words that help people find strength, rebuild confidence, and move forward.