Jonathan Ive Quotes

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

I want to do nothing chic, I want to have ideas before beginning a piece.

If you're saying the same line 10 times and making it look like you just came up with it, that's acting.

I think if you're good and you can persuade people you're going to be able to do that role and ultimately the audience buys it, then it doesn't matter whether you were really a chimpanzee in disguise! You've done it.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

To be persuasive we must be believable. To be believable, we must be truthful.

You can be stuck for two weeks on a problem, and then you get the right couple of people in a room, and in five minutes, you get a great answer.

Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?'

I'm not trying to twist people's heads around. I'm not trying to say, "Believe in me."

The great advantage of telling the truth is that one is so much more likely to sound convincing

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearer’s mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself.

What is acting but lying and what is good lying but convincing lying?

I can be singing about cat food and I'll make you think that I mean it.

I always work on the theory that the audience will believe you best if you believe yourself.

The simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.

Nothing convinces persons of a weak understanding so effectually, as what they do not comprehend.

Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends.

I think people are more apt to believe photographs, especially if it’s something fantastic. They’re willing to be more gullible. Sometimes they want fantasy. Even if they know it’s fake they can believe anything. People are accustomed to being told what to believe in.

Too great cleverness is but deceptive delicacy, true delicacy is the most substantial cleverness.

When you begin your work, nothing exists. When it is finished it looks as if it just happened, spontaneously, effortlessly, convincingly. It looks as though it had been there all along.

Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.

Truth is the easiest thing to sell.

The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.

If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em.