Top 40 Ruby Wax Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You shouldn’t run away from your problems, you need to aim straight for the heart of the beast.”

— Ruby Wax

2. “Thoughts aren’t fact, so don’t take them seriously.”

— Ruby Wax

3. “Only if you’re kind to yourself, can you be kind to others.”

— Ruby Wax

4. “For me mindfulness is like building a house, so the next time the tsunami that is depression comes I’ll have a structure in place to resist it.”

— Ruby Wax

5. “This disease comes with a package: shame. When any other part of your body gets sick, you get sympathy.”

— Ruby Wax

6. “I’m lucky not to have a nine-to-five job.”

— Ruby Wax

7. “It’s amazing how we will suffer pain and abuse to keep our lives predictable. We’ll let our inner voices brutalize us, rather than live with the possibility that we might be wrong about how we see things. We’ll think, ‘Well at least it’s a pain that’s familiar’. Uncertainty.”

— Ruby Wax

8. “Life is not a rerun, we don’t have stunt doubles or understudies, we’re it. The universe doesn’t happen to us, we are the universe happening. It actually matters what we do.”

— Ruby Wax

9. “On the toilet no one is a star. Remember that and you will go far in life.”

— Ruby Wax

10. “My whole career has been an act of revenge.”

— Ruby Wax

11. “The oxytocin doesn’t just induce feelings of pleasure, it stimulates empathy and compassion, which are also contagious, and so we infect each other with kindness and that is when the human race is at its finest.”

— Ruby Wax

12. “Mum used to hide love letters from my boyfriends and put me down. Now I understand that she was a Polish immigrant forced to settle in Chicago. She was jealous of the freedom life gave me.”

— Ruby Wax

13. “I have to keep reminding myself that I am their mother. Sometimes we are sitting at home and I feel like we are waiting for our mom to come home.”

— Ruby Wax

14. “Why, when you have a mental disease, is it always considered an act of imagination? Why is it that every organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?”

— Ruby Wax

15. “It’s so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.”

— Ruby Wax

16. “What once made you safe now drives you insane.”

— Ruby Wax

17. “Like any working mother I find it hard to have a social life. But my kids are so well adjusted. There isn’t a brat bone in their body so I haven’t done anything that bad.”

— Ruby Wax

18. “1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I’ve had both.”

— Ruby Wax

19. “We never see the world as it really is but only how we see it. And because we’re trapped in our own interpretation, we are prepared to go to war with other people caught in their view of reality – and never the twain shall meet.”

— Ruby Wax

20. “The point is, we’re all changing all the time. You once found it hard to tie a shoelace and now you don’t even have to look. The change is so subtle; you think that whatever you feel like right now is how you always felt. Our brain can trick us into thinking life stands still. In the end this causes the human race the most heartache. Blinkered.”

— Ruby Wax

21. “College athletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil.”

— Ruby Wax

22. “I am lucky to have good Polish skin that doesn’t wrinkle so I might be around for a few years yet.”

— Ruby Wax

23. “I can’t do anything too serious like Saddam Hussein, but I would like to do Bill Clinton. That’d be fun.”

— Ruby Wax

24. “Some interviewees you make friends with and some you don’t.”

— Ruby Wax

25. “I’ve learnt that if you let out your anger on someone, it comes back to you like acid reflux and you’ve poisoned yourself and feel toxic and nauseated while the taxi driver probably just goes back to his home and wife and has a lovely life. I.”

— Ruby Wax

26. “Why is that when people become ill and have something wrong with any of their organs, they get sympathy from other people – except when that organ is their brain?”

— Ruby Wax

27. “Nannies love working in our house because they never know who’s gonna walk through the door.”

— Ruby Wax

28. “I never weigh myself, but the brutal truth of television is that they don’t employ old people or fat people.”

— Ruby Wax

29. “You have to be great friends and make each other laugh. We laugh a lot and neither is jealous of the other.”

— Ruby Wax

30. “By the time dessert arrives I am usually so drunk, I can’t remember what I’m serving.”

— Ruby Wax

31. “I’ll say it again – mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn’t consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, “Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys?” Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it’s a killer if not taken seriously.”

— Ruby Wax

32. “I’ve told so many lies about my age I don’t know how old I am myself.”

— Ruby Wax

33. “I knew nothing about football, then someone showed me a film of Petit and I realised how interesting the game could be. He is divine. When I met him I could barely speak, he was so gorgeous. Women will love that show.”

— Ruby Wax

34. “The ultimate freedom lies in knowing everything, including you, is in a state of flux; you’re never still, you’re always ‘nexting’;.”

— Ruby Wax

35. “Being a mother is hard and it wasn’t a subject I ever studied.”

— Ruby Wax

36. “And as we get older, our lenses get more and more narrow and blurrier until we only see our own tiny pin-point view; this limited vision eventually makes bigots of us all. This is why so many marriages fall apart. You meet someone, think that you know them, marry them and then ten years later you divorce them because they turned out not to be who you thought they were. They never were.”

— Ruby Wax

37. “Our brain has been shaped by evolutionary pressure over time to provide our bodies with ever more efficient ways of surviving and reproducing. It is designed to process all information for the purpose of living on, it doesn’t care about happiness – it has things to do, places to go.”

— Ruby Wax

38. “In my opinion, our downfall began when we started to think of ourselves as ‘individuals’.”

— Ruby Wax

39. “Now we determine each other’s worth by asking, ‘What do you do?’ If you say ‘nothing’, people move away from you as if you’re a corpse.”

— Ruby Wax

40. “The most cognitively brilliant people usually have had to sacrifice their emotional selves.”

— Ruby Wax

41. “Here’s what I don’t understand: if something called neuroplasticity is a hard, cold fact, why haven’t we, the masses, heard much about it? Why are we left sitting here with a measly fourteen shades of grey, when, if we’re talking about the brain, there are a trillion possible shades.”

— Ruby Wax

42. “It’s as though as a species we have no brakes, only breakdowns.”

— Ruby Wax

43. “I don’t combine proteins and carbohydrates.”

— Ruby Wax

44. “We are our own walking pharmacies shooting ourselves up with our own homemade chemicals. This constant need for a fix to make you feel good prompts you to pursue rewards over and over again and strengthens the behaviour that made you want to get them in the first place. It’s a vicious circle. So.”

— Ruby Wax

45. “I’m a misplaced American, but don’t know where I was misplaced.”

— Ruby Wax