Top 280 James Altucher Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Oxytocin is released when you have an orgasm. For men, interestingly, it is only released when you have an orgasm with someone you love.”

— James Altucher

202. “And it took him about 15 years of writing every day, writing thousands of poems and stories before he finally started making a living as a writer. He wrote his first novel at the age of 49 and it was financially successful. After 25 years of plugging away at it he was finally a successful writer.”

— James Altucher

203. “Traveling to the past or the future will not help you now.”

— James Altucher

204. “There’s no way to know in advance if a business idea is a good one. Google started around 1996 but didn’t make a dime of money until around 2001.”

— James Altucher

205. “Quote from the pope: “If we start without confidence, already we have lost half the battle and we bury our talents.”

— James Altucher

206. “Not every failure is an opportunity. But figure it out. Look at the times you failed. How many, in retrospect, were opportunities. About.”

— James Altucher

207. “Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.”

— James Altucher

208. “Collisions are the fundamental life-giving processes of the universe. Ideas are no different. The best ideas come from collisions between newer and older ideas.”

— James Altucher

209. “You can find the tools to be happy right now. I still don’t know what my purpose is. I’m afraid I will never know. That makes me very happy. Maybe I can have lots of adventures between today and the day I die. Maybe I can do lots of different things. And if I don’t – if I die even tomorrow – that’s fine also. What does purpose mean when we are dead? We might as well choose to be happy now.”

— James Altucher

210. “But action leaks the panic out of your head.”

— James Altucher

211. “Should I listen to venture capitalists? Yes, of course. They gave you money. But then don’t do anything they ask you to do.”

— James Altucher

212. “If you lower your expectations, for instance, your expectations are easy to exceed.”

— James Altucher

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

— James Altucher

214. “We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.”

— James Altucher

215. “This is about a new phase in history where art, science, business, and spirit will join together, both externally and internally, in the pursuit of true wealth. It’s a phase where ideas are more important than people.”

— James Altucher

216. “All of my friends are superheroes, too. Each one of my friends has a different power. But they are all amazing powers and I’m blessed when I see those powers in action. And once someone joins the bad guys, they are no longer my friend. I’m busy saving lives. I don’t need bad friends.”

— James Altucher

217. “Doing my best in any situation is all I can do. If I worry about it while I’m doing it, I won’t do my best.”

— James Altucher

218. “You don’t have to come up with the new, new thing. Just do the old, old thing slightly better than everyone else.”

— James Altucher

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

— James Altucher

220. “Reinvention is never over. Today is the first day.”

— James Altucher

221. “Society is made up of individuals. The only way to improve society is to come at it from a place of deep, individual satisfaction. The only way to do that is to spend long periods of time just being silent. Find out who the real you is. Ask yourself, “These thoughts that I am thinking, what is generating them?” They are not your thoughts. That is just the biological brain dancing in front of you. Who is the “you” they are dancing in front of? Find that answer, and then you can save the world.”

— James Altucher

222. “Tomorrow is 100 percent based on the negotiations you do today.”

— James Altucher

223. “You are entitled to say NO to wearing a mask in order to get people to like you.”

— James Altucher

224. “I realized that I was an amateur. I had spent my life pretending to be something I wasn’t.”

— James Altucher

225. “I’m trying to have fewer things in my life right now. This doesn’t always mean fewer trinkets that shine on a shelf. It also might mean fewer things that upset me. Fewer people who bother me. Fewer regrets about things that are long dead and buried. Fewer anxieties about a future that may or may not exist.”

— James Altucher

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

— James Altucher

227. “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.”

— James Altucher

228. “In one column is the list of ideas. In the other column is the list of “First Steps” – only the first step, because you have no idea where that first step will take you.”

— James Altucher

229. “We can no longer afford to rely on others and repeat the same mistakes from our pasts.”

— James Altucher

230. “Speak to breathe spirit into an idea, to be enthusiastic, to convey emotion, to influence. This is the only way to have impact with your unique creativity.”

— James Altucher

231. “The ethic of the Choose Yourself era is to not depend on those stifling trends that are defeating you. Instead, build your own platform, have faith and confidence in yourself instead of a jury-rigged system, and define success by your own terms.”

— James Altucher

232. “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.”

— James Altucher

233. “In every business, I’ve loved meeting my competitors. The reality is there’s no such thing as competition. The world is big enough for two people in the same space.”

— James Altucher

234. “We live in a world where the yellow brick road has many forks and can take us on many incredible journeys.”

— James Altucher

235. “That’s when it clicked. When everything changed. When I realized that nobody else was going to do it for me. If I was going to thrive, to survive, I had to choose myself. In every way. The stakes have risen too high not to.”

— James Altucher

236. “If the wants, needs, and prejudices of others, even those you love, take up too much mental real estate in your brain, then you have no room left over to actually be the person you were meant to be – the person who actually has the potential to help others.”

— James Altucher

237. “But one thing is for sure: if you don’t make courageous choices for yourself, nobody else will. There’s.”

— James Altucher

238. “Don’t forget to always give extra. A simple effort will get you a customer for life.”

— James Altucher

239. “Most people obsess on regrets in their past or anxieties in their future. I call this “time-travelling”. The past and future don’t exist. They are memories and speculation, neither of which you have any control over. You don’t need to time travel anymore. You can live right now.”

— James Altucher

240. “Kamal’s excellent book close this chapter: If a painful memory arises, don’t fight it or try to push it away – you’re in quicksand. Struggle reinforces pain. Instead, go to love. Love for yourself. Feel it. If you have to fake it, fine. It’ll become real eventually. Feel the love for yourself as the memory ebbs and flows. That will take the power away.”

— James Altucher

241. “It’s one thing to know “The Secret” or take whatever life-affirming steps you’ve read about in order to bring positivity into your life, but it’s something else altogether to actually create opportunities for yourself. You’re definitely not going to find them reading a book.”

— James Altucher

242. “The key is building the foundation underneath. And then taking a positive action: to choose yourself.”

— James Altucher

243. “Dwelling on negativity won’t suddenly have positive results. It only brings more negativity into your head. You can’t buy happiness with the currency of unhappiness. 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.”

— James Altucher

244. “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.”

— James Altucher

245. “But once you divide the world into categories, into an “us” versus “them,” then you immediately become a “them” and lose touch with who you really are. And.”

— James Altucher

246. “But the most important thing these rejections gave me was a sense that NEVER AGAIN should I rely on the whims of one person to choose my success or failure in any endeavor.”

— James Altucher

247. “Keep going until you hit the finish line!” It’s “Keep failing until you accidentally no longer fail.” That’s persistence. NOT.”

— James Altucher

248. “I don’t like the word purpose. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy. People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to “pay our dues,” go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our “purpose,” where now we can be happy.”

— James Altucher

249. “The world right now is filled with fog. Honesty is a beacon. Your honesty – saying no to the lying – is what will bring the lost ships home. It’s what will bring health, love, and money to you.”

— James Altucher

250. “Ninety-nine percent of the people on the street will lick the flavor right off your Life Saver if you let them.”

— James Altucher