Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” was used by Stewart Brand as the closing message on the back cover of the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog (the “Last Whole Earth Catalog”) in 1974. The Catalog—an influential countercultural compendium of tools, books, and ideas—encouraged self-education, experimentation, and personal agency. Brand said he took the phrase from a “Whole Earth Epilog” and presented it as a parting exhortation to readers: keep the appetite to learn (“hungry”) and the willingness to take unconventional risks (“foolish”) rather than settling into complacency. The line later gained wider fame when Steve Jobs quoted it in his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

The aphorism pairs two virtues that often look like vices. “Hungry” suggests sustained curiosity, ambition, and dissatisfaction with easy answers—an insistence on growth rather than comfort. “Foolish” reframes social or professional caution as a trap: to remain open to new possibilities, one must sometimes appear naïve, impractical, or eccentric. Together, the phrases advocate a lifelong beginner’s mindset—continual learning and bold experimentation—especially in creative and technological cultures where progress depends on questioning norms. The imperative form (“Stay…”) makes it a discipline, not a mood: a deliberate refusal of complacency and fear of looking wrong.