A few months ago I finished this wonderful biography of Steve Jobs, who–along with Muhammad Ali–is, I reckon, the most inspirational figure in recent times. These are some of my favourite quotes from the book:

“The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it.  I think different religions are different doors to the same house.  Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t.  It’s the great mystery.”

“I came of age at a magical time.  Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD.  Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.  LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, buy you know it.  It reinforced my sense of what was important- creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

“Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India.  The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world.  Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”

“In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.  People DO judge a book by its cover.  We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc…; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

“I never worried about money.  I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve.  And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by.  I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working.  So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money.”

“It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players.  The Microsoft experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”