Quote

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

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Walter Isaacson
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: May 20
Biographer
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Makes
Understood
Lisa
Art
Emotional
Leonardo
Light
Painting
Elusive
Ever
Goes
Muscles
Done
Greatest
Strikes
Work
Eye
Mysterious
Flickers
Making
Lips
Mona
Science
Smile
Optics

More quotes by Walter Isaacson

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What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.
Walter Isaacson
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I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight - Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
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On Startups: I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.
Walter Isaacson
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A theme of digital success is keeping it simple.
Walter Isaacson
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People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.
Walter Isaacson
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for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.
Walter Isaacson
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He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn't think I could do.... If you trust him, you can do things. If he's decided that something should happen, then he's just going to make it happen. (Elizabeth Holmes)
Walter Isaacson
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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
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One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
Walter Isaacson
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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
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I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
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Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.
Walter Isaacson
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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
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More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.
Walter Isaacson
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Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.
Walter Isaacson
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I think it's really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It's bringing more and more people in to watching the news.
Walter Isaacson
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The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.
Walter Isaacson
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But the point is to get a whole new generation of people and people in general more re-engaged in news, and this has happened a lot since September 11th of course.
Walter Isaacson
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I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.
Walter Isaacson
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Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.
Walter Isaacson