Top 167 Quotes & Sayings by James Altucher

In every business I had ever started, even ones that had totally failed, I had kept good relations with the investors.

We all have faith in something: usually a mixture of some personal beliefs with modern science. I am not like that. Mostly I just believe in what personally has worked for me.

Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every 'world' I've been in, most people I've meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.

Procrastination is your body telling you you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing.

The people who know personal finance hide the money very carefully.

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

You're the average of the five people you spend your time with.

I loved Internet businesses, having built and sold one. And I loved the financial business, despite the fact that it was almost all a scam.

Products are valued higher than services.

You'll have to hire people to expand your business. But it's a good discipline to really question if you need each and every hire.

Don't stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want - freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.

Quantity and persistence will get you the outcomes you need.

Poor speakers create an artificial divide between themselves and the audience. They feel they need to do this in order to establish their own credibility.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an employee, a student, a homemaker, a writer, it's time to start forgetting about all the ways the world has promised you safety and comfort.

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

Do what you do with love, and success is a natural symptom.

Somebody has to be on stage, and some people have to be in the audience. That's the only difference. Don't put any thought as to why you are on the stage or how you need to be 'better' than the people in the audience. You aren't better. You're simply the speaker.

I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.

When I give away a book for free, it gets my name out there. That has lifelong value for me that goes way beyond the few dollars I could maybe charge.

Poker is a charismatic game. People who are larger than life play poker and make their living from playing games and hustling.

I saw 'Star Wars' when I was seven years old, and it changed my life.

Don't sweat it if you are stuck in the corporate job right now. But begin to plan ahead. I know from much personal experience that it takes 1-3 years to transition from total scratch to making a living from home in any career you want.

Every day, you reinvent yourself. You're always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward.

Life is cold. People stay warm through the intimacy of a story.

Don't regret your mistakes. You'll always make mistakes. The better you are, the less mistakes you make. The only way to get better is to thoroughly analyze your mistakes.

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.

How great is it to just rest and be happy and not move when you don't have to.

Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.

Don't forget: when you start a website, it's not yet a trusted site. So you have to bring people from a trusted site to your site to build up the trust in your site.

You can only make money doing what you love.

Honesty is about the scars. It's about the blemishes. But it's more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. It's about truly helping people.

Investing is for wealth preservation, not wealth creation, so first you have to make wealth.

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

Worry will never solve tomorrow's problems. It will only take energy away from today.

Poker is a skill game pretending to be a chance game.

I made so many mistakes in my first successful business I'm almost embarrassed to recount them.

Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. One hundred years from now, your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.

You can't make money without selling something real. You can't make something real without first imagination manifesting itself in your head. You can't have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings.

I've had to change careers several times. Sometimes because my interests changed. Sometimes because all bridges have been burned beyond recognition, sometimes because I desperately needed money. And sometimes just because I hated everyone in my old career or they hated me.

If you introduce person A to person B, and then person B is able to solve a pain point in his life, then you just made a good connection.

I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love emailing with readers.

My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure.

The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.

Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read.

Nobody wants to make me a rich man. In fact, most people want to make me a very poor man. I can guarantee some people fantasize at night about how poor they can make me.

Most people don't have the power of persuasion.

Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.

Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur: an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

I'm scammed almost every day. Or, if not scammed, at the very least someone tries to scam me. Usually more than once a day.

Take control of who you report to, what you do, what you create. Or start a business on the side. Deliver some value, any value, to anybody, to somebody, and watch that value compound into a career.

Happiness is just a positive perception from our brain. Some days, you will be unhappy. Our brain is a tool we use. It's not who we are.

I can tell you this: Everything in my life that I am happy about it is the product of a huge mistake.

I find that many entrepreneurs are trying to do everything when it would be cheaper and more time-efficient to delegate, even if there are monetary costs associated with that.

Become a beacon of enhancement, and then, when the night is gray, all of the boats will move towards you, bringing their bountiful riches.

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

Everyone is different. We all suffer from the disease of being human. There are a thousand cures but no antidotes.

Read every book, blog, website, whatever, about what you want to be an expert in.

Games are all about taking risks.

Whenever things are good, I always worry about what could go wrong.