James Altucher Quotes

I can't just expect people to know what to say. I have to make them see me as more than my illness.

First of all, you need to love yourself, 'cause that's the only way you're going to get by and be O.K. as an individual. But it's important to make other people feel loved because you never know what they're going through.

I'm no expert. I have no psychic powers, and I sure don't possess any secret wisdom. I'm just Janet. I have strengths, weaknesses, fears, happiness, sadness. I experience joy and I experience pain. I'm highly emotional. I'm very vulnerable.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever.

I'm very human.

We all can relate to people's weaknesses. We might put up a facade that everything is perfect but none of us are. When we see that weakness in somebody else, we understand or give ourselves a little bit of leeway.

I am just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human.

To talk about balance, it's easier to talk about what's out of balance. And I think anytime that you have any disease, and disease meaning lack of ease, lack of flow... dis-ease. So any time there's disease, you're out of balance, whether it's jealousy, anger, greed, anxiety, fear.

You have to work on forgiveness and love, and that includes your own self.

The main thing in life is not to be afraid of being human.

We don't wake up happy and looking absolutely perfect and feeling amazing every day, you know? We're only human. So I think, with me, I'm not really scared to let people see that - because it's real.

Remember we're all human and we all have our good days and bad days and days when we feel banging and other days when we feel absolutely rotten and that's ok.

I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.

Compassion for myself is the most powerful healer of them all.

At the end of the day, the only thing I ever wanted to feel was loved. So I think if I could give someone a piece of advice, it's really learn how to be kind to yourself. In all of our ugliness and all of our brokenness and our bad choices, to really learn to nurture that part of yourself that can be your own big sister in a way.

There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.

Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

It's occurred to me I need to laugh at myself more, and that I don't need to be some sad folk singer all the time. I don't want to be the queen of pain.

I'm terribly human.

I really don't need to suffer. I can really become a happy person and still make good music - in fact, better music.

When you treat yourself with the kindness and high regard that you would give to one of your spiritual heroes, your body becomes the epicenter of quiet joy rather than a battlefield for the ego.

It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.

To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.

It's hard to practice compassion when we're struggling with our authenticity or when our own worthiness is off-balance.