Top 167 Quotes & Sayings by James Altucher - Page 3

Nobody can tell you what to do. No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them. Every second defines you. Be who you are, not who anyone else is, or who anyone else wants you to be.

The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again.

The idea that we need to “pay our dues” is a lie told to us by people who wanted our efforts and labor on the cheap.

When we die our entire legacy is simply the added together strengths of all the connections we make with others. This is the ghost of ourselves we leave behind. This is showing up.

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

I had ideas first, wealth second. It only worked in that order.

Only worry about your own happiness, which doesn’t have to be limited by anyone else’s stupidity unless you allow it to be.

What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

Don't Time travel into the past. You can't change it. Today it starts all over again. Every tomorrow is determined by every day.

Your bosses simply hate you. You created more and more value. They paid you less and less. That's the definition of disdain in my book.

People build up a life, it becomes unsatisfactory, and they want to figure out how to change it like an outfit on a doll. But you can’t change life from the outside. We all know this now.

The best way I have ever found to fill that hole is not to seek external motivations to fill the emptiness, but to ignite the internal fire that will never go out. To light up my own inner sky.

Infinite patience gets you immediate results.

Requirements are for people who want to be unhappy. Because it’s your rules or the universe’s rules. The universe is going to win. Every time.

Success, in every case, comes from the alchemy of your health, your mind, your positive energy, and the real world situations you persistently improve for yourself.

It's easy to get anonymous people to hate you. Have an opinion. Be creative. Be yourself.

Purpose is a man-made fiction. Nobody on their deathbed gets a plaque that says "he focused on only one thing for his entire life!" Those are counterfeit thoughts in a counterfeit society.

Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction-creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?

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

Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again.

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. 100 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.

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

No longer is someone coming to hire you, to invest in your company, to sign you, to pick you. It's on you to make the most important decision in your life: Choose Yourself!

Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.

It's very important to enjoy what you're doing or else you are always going to procrastinate.

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.

Dont buy into the 20-hours-a-day entrepreneur myth. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to have a focused mind.

It's in the valley of failure that we sow our seeds of success.

Luck is created by the prepared.

This is a cliché, but never listen to anyone who says “You can’t do that”. Those are usually the people who can’t do it. Not you.

Anxiety and gratitude cant live in the same head

Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.

The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.

Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it's more impressive than handing a business card.

If too many things have to happen in order to bring about the situation you want, then back out of it and try again later.

But business is just a vehicle for transforming the ideas in your head into something real, something tangible, that actually improves the lives of others. To create something unique and beautiful and valuable is very hard. It’s very special to do. It doesn’t happen fast.

Branding jails corporate America but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.

This is a new phase in history where art, science, business and spirit will join together in the pursuit of true wealth.

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

The big thing in life is to focus on providing more value to people than they expect. The rest comes then.

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.

I'm a big believer in minimalism. Not materialist minimalism although that's part of it but time and energy minimalism. The body is given only so much energy a day.

If coming up with ten ideas sounds too hard, then come up with twenty.

We’re taught at an early age that we’re not good enough. That someone else has to choose us in order for us to be…what? Blessed? Rich? Certified? Legitimized? Educated? Partnership material?

Teaching how to think is better than lecturing how to do it.

Being grateful is the bridge between the world of nightmares and the world where we are free to say no. It's the bridge between the world of delusions and the world of creativity. It's the power that brings death back to life, the power that turns poverty to wealth and anger to compassion.

Hold your breath. Try holding your breath for just thirty seconds. That’s all it takes. Try it right now while you are looking at this line. Now…on the twenty-ninth second, do any opinions matter?