Latest Walter Isaacson Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The Mona Lisa, to me, is the greatest emotional painting ever done. The way the smile flickers makes it a work of both art and science, because Leonardo understood optics, and the muscles of the lips, and how light strikes the eye - all of it goes into making the Mona Lisa's smile so mysterious and elusive.

  Walter Isaacson

  Art, Eye, Emotional

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Leonardo da Vinci was comfortable being illegitimate, gay, a misfit, a heretic. But he also respected other people. He didn't get into disputations. He was a genius but he had a certain humility. In his notebooks you see lists of people he wanted to grill about things like how the water diversions in Milan work; he was always interested in learning from other people.

  Walter Isaacson

  Notebook, Humility, Gay

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I think Leonardo da Vinci teaches us the value of both being focused on things that fascinate us but also, at times, being distracted and deciding to pursue some shiny new idea that you happen to stumble upon. Balancing intense focus with being interested in a whole lot of different things is something that we have to do in the Internet age.

  Walter Isaacson

  Thinking, Focus, Age

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Leonardo da Vinci did not take received wisdom - whether from ancient classical thinkers or medieval scholars or from the Bible - without questioning it. And this was the beginning of the scientific method. This is another lesson for our time: that when we have evidence that contradicts a certain belief, we should be willing to change it. I think this made Leonardo, in some ways, a person who better understood the beauty of God's creation than a person who just takes all received wisdom from the Bible on faith.

  Walter Isaacson

  Thinking, Belief, Ancient

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Leonardo da Vinci was lucky to be born the same year that Johannes Gutenberg opened his printing shop. As a young person, he could get information about whatever struck his curiosity. The Internet is to our age what Gutenberg's press was to his, so he would have loved being alive today.

  Walter Isaacson

  Curiosity, Age, Live For Today

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• We relate to Leonardo da Vinci because his genius was just being passionately curious about everything. He wanted to know everything he could know about our universe, including how we fit into it. We can't all have a superhuman intellect like Albert Einstein's, but we can be super-curious. And we can also quit smashing curiosity out of the hands our children.

  Walter Isaacson

  Children, Curiosity, Genius

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Leonardo da Vinci had such a playful curiosity. If you read his notebooks, you'll see he's curious about what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like, but also why the sky is blue, or how an emotion forms on somebody's lips. He understood the beauty of everything. I've admired Leonardo my whole life, both as a kid who loved engineering - he was one of the coolest engineers in history - and then as a college student, when I travelled to see his notebooks and paintings.

  Walter Isaacson

  Notebook, Kids, College

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• If you want to be a great American, you have got to understand Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, how the American Revolution happened. I think if you want to be a good citizen of the digital age, it helps to feel comfortable with both the people and the ways of thinking that created the digital revolution.

  Walter Isaacson

  Thinking, People, Age

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think America is really well-positioned, because we do train people to be creative and sometimes resist authority, which helps in being an innovator. I think you're going to see for the next phase of the revolution all sorts of wonderful ways of connecting art and literature and journalism into new forms of digital expression.

  Walter Isaacson

  Art, Thinking, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• We're all swimming in this digital revolution that we live in.

  Walter Isaacson

  Swimming, Revolution

  Source: www.pbs.org

• You and I love understanding American Revolution, but let's also understand the digital revolution, because that makes us more comfortable with our technology.

  Walter Isaacson

  Technology, Understanding, Revolution

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Mainly, the reason people who didn't succeed had trouble because they had trouble forming teams. They didn't know how to collaborate.

  Walter Isaacson

  Team, People, Succeed

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Most innovation comes from people working together, collaborating in teams.

  Walter Isaacson

  Team, People, Innovation

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Without Steve Jobs, you would have well-designed computers, probably open and not integrated, but they wouldn't have sex appeal, they wouldn't have romance.

  Walter Isaacson

  Jobs, Sex, Romance

  "Isaacson's Steve Jobs Rages, Weeps, Adds Sex to Tech: Interview". Interview with Zinta Lundborg, www.sfgate.com. November 30, 2011.

• By the end of his career, he [Steve Jobs] has proven that he can do the impossible, and he has gathered probably the most loyal team of eight players of any business in America.

  Walter Isaacson

  Jobs, Team, Player

  "Steve Jobs Biography Examines How Rule-Breaker Tied ‘Artistry to Engineering’". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. October 28, 2011.

• Not playing by the rules, not seeing things conventionally, that's the heart of who he [ Steve Jobs] is, and he does it in small ways of everyday rebellion just almost to assert who he is, like not putting a license plate on his car.

  Walter Isaacson

  Jobs, Heart, Car

  "Steve Jobs Biography Examines How Rule-Breaker Tied 'Artistry to Engineering'". Interview with Jefferey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 27, 2011.

• I think that notion of being a seeker, somebody who never felt totally fulfilled, but was always passionate about the search, that comes from the background, probably.

  Walter Isaacson

  Thinking, Passionate, Backgrounds

  "Steve Jobs Biography Examines How Rule-Breaker Tied 'Artistry to Engineering'". "The PBS NewsHour" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 27, 2011.

• I think that genius comes not just from having great mental processing power. It comes from being able to, as Steve Jobs' ad said, think different.

  Walter Isaacson

  Jobs, Thinking, Different

  "Steve Jobs Biography Examines How Rule-Breaker Tied 'Artistry to Engineering'". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 27, 2011.