Paul Allen Quotes

Paul Allen was a famous American businessman, philanthropist, billionaire and art collector. He is best known for being the co-founder of the software company Microsoft with Bill Gates. His art collection included paintings from artists like Gustav Klimt, Jasper Johns, Lucian Freud, Paul Gauguin, Alberto Giacometti, JMW Turner, and Claude Monet.

Mini biography: Born Paul Gardner Allen on the 21st of January, 1953 in Seattle, Washington, United States of America. His mother was Edna Faye Gardner and his father Kenneth Sam Allen was a librarian. Allen never married or had children. The businessman and art collector died on the 15th of October, 2018 in Seattle, Washington, U.S. at the age of 65. Paul G. Allen is buried at the Acacia Memorial Park and Funeral Home, Lake Forest Park, King County, Washington, USA.

List of Famous Paul Allen Quotes

It’s great to make a pilgrimage to museums, but after a while you start wondering what it would be like to live with amazing pieces. Paul Allen

I’m trying to transmit the visions of creativity and build institutions that are incredibly catalytic to their fields. Paul Allen

When you look at a painting you’re looking into a different country, into someone else’s imagination, how they saw it. Paul Allen

Talent is indeed essential, but seasoning and maturity are not to be underestimated. Paul Allen

In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success—if you are willing to learn from it. Paul Allen

I’m always trying to figure out where the future’s going. So maybe that’s why I find landscapes interesting. It’s as if they are windows onto different realities. In the Klimt, you can feel the stillness and the calmness and the eternal nature of a forest. Or you can have an artist trying to capture a volcanic eruption, which is not still at all. Paul Allen

Any crusade requires optimism and the ambition to aim high. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to find my own challenges, see them through to fruition, and—if everything breaks right—change the world for the better. Paul Allen

Years ago there was a van Gogh self-portrait that he supposedly painted for his mother, and the bid price just got too high — I think it was something above $75 million. Now it’s probably worth far more than that, but you have to be very careful not to get caught up in a bidding war. Paul Allen

It turns out if you go 1,000 feet down in the ocean, it’s really dark, and the animals are really strange, but if you put on some Pink Floyd, it’s fantastic. Paul Allen

In my own work, I’ve tried to anticipate what’s coming over the horizon, to hasten its arrival, and to apply it to people’s lives in a meaningful way. Paul Allen

I’m attracted to things like pointillism or a Jasper Johns ‘numbers’ work because they come out of breaking something down into its components, like bytes or numbers but in a different kind of language. Paul Allen

Imagine how all of our lives would be stimulated and changed if there were other societies out there beyond our solar system. It’s a very, very long shot. But I thought it was worth it. Paul Allen

There’s going to be reversals. You have to be ready, to be philosophical about that. Paul Allen

My style was to absorb all the data I could to make the best-informed decision possible, sometimes to the point of over-analysis. Paul Allen

Sometimes when you live with art, you stop seeing it in the way that someone fresh to it sees it. I want to be able to give people the same kind of eye-opening experience I had when I first went to the Tate over 30 years ago. Paul Allen

Technology is notorious for engrossing people so much that they don’t always focus on balance and enjoy life at the same time. Paul Allen

For the most part, the best opportunities now lie where your competitors have yet to establish themselves, not where they’re already entrenched. Microsoft is struggling to adapt to that new reality. Paul Allen

We said, ‘Hey, if we’re really successful we could form a company that could grow to around 35 employees.’ Microsoft is today north of 90,000 employees. So obviously we blew through our initial hopes and dreams there. Paul Allen

Few things worth doing can be done alone. To get past the conceptual stage, ideas need to become crusades; you’ve got to convince people to join you. I was lucky right off the bat to find Bill Gates, whose passion for business matched mine for tracking technology. Paul Allen

During the founding first eight years my ideas were definitely key to the company. Bill would test my ideas. I would come to him with another 10 ideas that never went anywhere – he was the sanity check on the flow of ideas. When it came to selling and marketing and staffing and all those kinds of things, he was much more excited on the business side, so we became very complementary. Paul Allen

More on Famous American Art Collector Paul G. Allen

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Related or similar popular collectors and businessmen include: J Paul Getty, Gustav Klimt, Paul Cezanne, Andy Warhol, and other Famous American Business People.