I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

These are the sentences from Steve Jobs’ emotional resignation letter. Is this the end of a era or a new beginning. Who knows, but the truth is what he did for the giant company Apple and what he said to the world. Here are my selection of best quotes from Steve Jobs:

• Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
• I think we’re having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we’re always trying to do better.
• A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
• Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?
• Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
• For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
• You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
• Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
• We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.
• To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.
• Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
• You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
• Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.
• I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
• In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
• The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.
• It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans.
• Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… That’s what matters to me.
• I want to put a ding in the universe.
• I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.

And here’s one of his amazing speeches as a bonus.

Please add quotes that you know as comment.