The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn’t even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we’d never have had the light bulb.

On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit.

Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I’m doing, I always tell myself, ‚You can do better than this.‘

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Around every corner, always protect the engine that powers you.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Marines don’t know how to spell the word ‚defeat‘.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Originality is really important.

We all face storms in life. Some are more difficult than others, but we all go through trials and tribulation. That’s why we have the gift of faith.

The only way round is through.

We may stumble and fall but shall rise again; it should be enough if we did not run away from the battle.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different; it takes something that’s really new and really captures people’s imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

The tool that’s most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

Fun is one of the most important – and underrated – ingredients in any successful venture. If you’re not having fun, then it’s probably time to call it quits and try something else.

The potential financial reward for building the ‚next Windows‘ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

All great achievements require time.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.

Movies are not novels, and that’s why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can’t be done.

Even the securest financial plan and the finest health coverage aren’t enough to hold us steady when the challenges come… We need something more, something deeper and unshakeable, something that will see us through life’s hard times.

Hey, I think it’s easy for guys to hit .300 and stay in the big leagues. Hit .200 and try to stick around as long as I did; I think it’s a much greater accomplishment. That’s hard.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Whenever you do something, people try to re-do it and do a better version, especially if they’re in another country.

With Kansas, I had a four-year deal. The initial two months were real tough. I had to adjust a lot. Then, things started looking up.

Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment.

In a time not distant, it will be possible to flash any image formed in thought on a screen and render it visible at any place desired. The perfection of this means of reading thought will create a revolution for the better in all our social relations.

All ballplayers should quit when it starts to feel as if all the baselines run uphill.

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

When you are a beginning film maker you are desperate to survive. The most important thing in the end is survival and being able to get to your next picture.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

Victory belongs to the most persevering.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they’re transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

After the first day of practice, there’s not one guy who’s playing at 100 percent or who feels great. Sometimes, getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth is the hardest part of the day – it just hurts.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

I think we are at the dawn of a new era in commercial space exploration.