James Altucher Quotes

“The only real fire to cultivate is the fire inside of you. Nothing external will nourish you forever.”

“Persistence creates luck.”

“You’ve done all you can do. All that is within your power, your control. Now, give up the results. The right thing will happen.”

“Don’t buy into the 20-hours-a-day entrepreneur myth. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to have a focused mind.”

“In order to be creative you have to be healthy physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.”

“You can’t help others if you look in the mirror and hate what you see.”

“Out of silence comes the greatest creativity. Not when we are rushing and panicking.”

“Anxiety and gratitude can’t live in the same head.”

“You are not just the average of the five people around you. You’re the average of the five habits you do.”

“Anger is just fear clothed.”

“Arguing with people is like reading your e-mail at 4 in the morning. There is absolutely no good that can come of it.”

“Don’t time travel into the past. You can’t change it. Today it starts all over again.”

“Ultimately we are the sum of our experiences and not the sum of our belongings.”

“Reading is the best return on investment. You have to live your entire life in order to know one life. But with reading you can know 1000s of people’s lives for almost no cost. What a great return!”

“I have never met a mentally strong person who wasn’t a voracious reader.”

“Mastery begins when formal education ends. Find the topic that sets your heart on fire. Then combust.”

“Being fearless precisely when you are most scared is the best hack.”

“If you want to be successful, you need to study success, not hate it or be envious of it. If you are envious, then you will distance yourself from success.”

“In life, you will always have 30 percent of people who love you, 30 percent who hate you and 30 percent who couldn’t care less.”

“If someone insists they need to be in prison even though the door is unlocked, then I am not going to argue. They are free to stay in prison.”

“Excuses are easy lies we tell ourselves to cover up our failures.”

“Honesty is the fastest way to prevent a mistake from turning into a failure.”

“Be honest. It’s hard enough to live one life, let alone a double life.”

“At any point in your career, you are either a thermostat or a thermometer.”

“If you don’t live in the world of choosing, you live in the world of excusing.”

“If you don’t choose yourself, someone else will and the result won’t be pleasant.”

“Never have your happiness dependent on a yes or no decision from one person.”

“Every day you reinvent yourself. You’re always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward.”

“The key to success is to approach everything with humility. To know that there is always something new to learn in this surreal art of being human.”

“Every tomorrow is determined by every today.”

“Basic garden math: 1% of seeds turns into 50% of the flowers. Plant lots of seeds.”

“The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again.”

“All decisions are either growth decisions or fear decisions.”

“Thinking keeps the adventures of life bottled in your head. Action makes you a hero.”

“Money you lose you can always make back. But even five minutes of time lost is gone forever.”

“Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.”

“Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don’t support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck.”

“Talent is the tiniest of sparks. A spark lights the fire. But you have to feed the fire more fuel to keep it going.”

“The muse, or the inspiration, does not just show up, it requires sweat as an offering.”

“Keep failing until you accidentally no longer fail. That’s persistence.”

“It’s in the valley of failure that we sow our seeds of success.”

“Don’t be sad when you fail and happy when you succeed. Both are going to happen again and again at every new level.”

“I started to care more about getting better than about winning. I started to study my losses.”

“Be around people who make you feel good. But also make you want to be better.”

“Filtering the people we allow into our lives is probably the most important factor in determining whether we will live a happy life or not.”

“If you can’t walk away from a negotiation, then you aren’t negotiating. You’re just working out the terms of your slavery.”

“When people give you their stated reason for doing something always assume they are giving you a reason that sounds good, but not the real reason.”

“Ultimately, the best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.”

“The only way to create value for yourself is to create value for others.”

“Often the best way to make friends and customers for life is to direct them to a better service or product than yours.”