Walter Isaacson Quotes

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, he said.55 One

Then I would explain, it was no use trying to learn math unless they could communicate it with other people.4

Then, unexpectedly, he phoned me late on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2009. He was at home in Palo Alto with only his

There Paul tried to pass along his love of mechanics and cars. Steve, this is your workbench now, he said as he marked off a section of the table in their garage.

There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth

There can be something he knows absolutely nothing about, and because of his crazy style and utter conviction, he can convince people that he knows what he’s talking about,

There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

There is an inspiring lesson in how Kilby and Noyce personally handled the question of who invented the microchip. They were both decent people; they came from tight-knit small communities in the Midw...

There is in all humans, however, a desire and a deeply felt duty to worship a more intimate God,

There was another reason that Joanne was balky about signing the adoption papers. Her father was about to die, and she planned to marry Jandali soon after.

There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.

They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a repo man,

They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do—keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

Think Different campaign, featuring iconic photos of some of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating.

Thirty years after Apple went public, he reflected on what it was like to come into money suddenly:I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. A...

This biography is essential reading. —The New York Times, Holiday Gift Guide A superbly told story of a superbly lived life.

This exposed an aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked: The best and most innovative products don’t always win.

This is largely because he felt it was futile to wrestle with theological questions about which he had no empirical evidence and thus no rational basis for forming an opinion. Thunderbolts from heaven...

This was fortunate. He would have made a poor notary: he got bored and distracted too easily, especially when a project became routine rather than creative.14