If hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it's worth the trade-off with my own privacy.

When you care about people's happiness and productivity, you give them what brings out the best in them and their creativity. And if you give them a choice, they'll say, 'I want an iPhone,' or 'I want a Mac.' We think we can win a lot of corporate decisions at that level.

While infusing technology with humanity, we are trying to make sure it's used for good and also trying to foresee some of the ways it can be used in a bad way and eliminate those.

I don't view Apple or myself as an activist. What we do is for some things where we think we have deep knowledge, or think we do, or a strong point of view, we're not shy. We'll stand up, speak out - even when our voice shakes.

I am very bullish on India because of its people, its culture, and the leadership. I love the culture and warmth of people.

Hopefully, people will look at our stance on privacy in general and know that we're not trying to operate outside of a fairly distinct line that we're drawing. I hope that people trust us to do the right thing there.

To me, this is the perfect marriage. There's no friction. There's just, we have what they need, they have what we need. And so IBM is in the process, with our help, of designing many different apps for many different verticals.

It's hard to edit. It's hard to stay focused. And yet, we know we'll only do our best work if we stay focused. And so, you know, the hardest decisions we made are all the things not to work on, frankly.

Work takes on new meaning when you feel you are pointed in the right direction. Otherwise, it's just a job, and life is too short for that.

The most important thing is, Do you have the courage to admit that you're wrong? And do you change? The most important thing to me as a CEO is that we keep the courage.

I think the iPhone is the best consumer product ever. That's what I feel about it. And it's become so integrated and integral to our lives, you wouldn't think about leaving home without it.

I don't subscribe to the view some people have in the industry that you should purposefully design products that do not last that long. I don't think it is good for anyone.

I decided to write 'True Refuge' during a major dive in my own health. Diagnosed with a genetic disease that affected my mobility, I faced tremendous fear and grief about losing the fitness and physical freedom I loved.

Buddhist practices offer a way of saying, 'Hey, come back over here, reconnect.' The only way that you'll actually wake up and have some freedom is if you have the capacity and courage to stay with the vulnerability and the discomfort.

My prayer became 'May I find peace... May I love this life no matter what.' I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come.

True refuge is that which allows us to be at home, at peace, to discover true happiness. The only thing that can give us true refuge is the awareness and love that is intrinsic to who we are. Ultimately, it's our own true nature.

If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.

If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.

Winning isn't everything, but it beats anything in second place.

A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty.

Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness - a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster - children into strength and athletic proportion.

Where hast thou wandered, gentle gale, to find the perfumes thou dost bring?

Go forth under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings.

There is no glory in star or blossom till looked upon by a loving eye; There is no fragrance in April breezes till breathed with joy as they wander by.

The moon is at her full, and riding high, Floods the calm fields with light. The airs that hover in the summer sky Are all asleep tonight.

The little windflower, whose just opened eye is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at.

The groves were God's first temples.

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.

And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger.

The secular world looks to the church and to its chagrin, finds no love, no life, no laughter, no hope and no happiness.

Passion is what gives meaning to our lives. It's what allows us to achieve success beyond our wildest imagination. Try to find a career path that you have a passion for.

I'm a perfectionist. And that's served me very well in my career. It allows me to handle these large, complex problems without letting things fall through the cracks... That is the mentality you have to have to attack these complex problems of chip design, for example, when you're overwhelmed with complexity.

If we want to increase our own happiness, we need to invest in growing the community happiness and also take care of the whole, of Mother Earth.

We need a mobilized and active civil society using its purchasing power to demand sustainable products and practices. It is also essential that governments commit to the future, creating fiscal and regulatory conditions for sustainable policies to thrive.

We need to be both conscious and competent to design products that emulate nature's life cycles, making sure that they endure and are either recycled or absorbed.

You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

You prevent kids from joining gangs by offering after-school programs, sports, mentoring, and positive engagement with adults. You intervene with gang members by offering alternatives and employment to help redirect their lives. You deal with areas of high gang crime activity with real community policing. We know what works.

The draconian spirit that seeks to enhance penalties and to lower the age at which juveniles will be tries as adults, is part of the 'whole cloth' of three strikes. Our failure to address the depair of our inner-city youth is only delayed by our over-confidence in a stance that is 'tougher than thou.'

Even gang members imagine a future that doesn't include gangs.

Does God feel like that same-sex marriage could happen? I don't think anybody who has a connection to God and God's understanding and depth of compassion who's gonna say 'no.'

Redemption is possible, and it is the measure of a civilized society.

As a society, we come up lacking in many of the marks of compassion and wisdom by which we measure ourselves as civilized.

All politics are local, and so in church.

I have a lot of people in my life, and I think there's something key: the thing that leads to intimacy and relationship and connection is tenderness.

I always have a funny story at communion time that underscores that no one is perfect, and that communion is not for perfect people but for hungry people.

Our best selves tell us that 'there but for the grace of God... ' and that, in the end, there is no distance, really, between us and them. It is just us. Our best and noble hope is to imitate the God we believe in. The God who has abundant room in God's grief and heart for us all.

If we give something positive to others, it will return to us. If we give negative, that negativity will be returned.

There are lots of things to do. Lots of movies to catch. Lots of places to visit... I try to bring in every real life experience into my acting.