Ruby Wax Quotes

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.

College atheletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil.

Much of what you see out there is manufactured by your brain, painted in like computer-generated graphics in a movie; only a very small part of the inputs to your occipital lobe comes directly from the external world, the rest comes from internal memory stores and other processes.

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

What once made you safe now drives you insane.

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

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

As far as my career or my university or my hometown went, I was on the bus out of town at the right time because I knew to walk away before I was pushed out.

I don't combine proteins and carbohydrates.

Jealousy I wish we could express this emotion like kids do. If someone gets something you want, you just hit them over the head and snatch it back. That's why children are so un-neurotic. They are doing what we only dream of. The

memorizing history in school, you should picture yourself in the Battle of Hastings and pretend to lose your legs. You won't forget it then. Parietal

Thoughts are not who you are, they're habitual patterns in the mind, nothing more and as soon as you see them that way, they lose their sting. I think of them as the noise of a radio in another room; I can pay attention, sing along with them if I want and also choose to ignore them.

Excessive chemicals eventually inhibit your immune system (the defence against infections and illnesses) making you vulnerable to viruses of every shape and size. They will lower the production of serotonin (making you feel listless and joyless as in depression) and can eventually, if they remain virulent, cause heart disease, hardening of the arteries, type 2 diabetes and certain cancers. Inadvertently stress will destroy you both mentally and physically unless you change the way you think about it and relate to it. With

to fill that gap. The habit of judging ourselves is what pounds us into the ground. You're

My whole career has been an act of revenge.

Thoughts aren't fact, so don't take them seriously

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

The essence of neuroplasticity is that what you practise you'll cultivate. If you are cruel and spiteful, you'll become expert at getting even crueller and more spiteful. If you practise being compassionate, you'll become more compassionate. That's how our brains work; the way we think or feel determines our wiring and what chemicals are coursing through our veins. If

It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement with black tar oozing through your veins and mind. This is when you can't decide whether to get a manicure or jump off a cliff. It's all the same. When I was institutionalised I sat on a chair unable to move for three months, frozen in fear. To take a shower was inconceivable. What made it tolerable was while I was inside, I found my tribe - my people. They understood and unlike those who don't suffer, never get bored of you asking if it will ever go away? They can talk medication all hours, day and night; heaven to my ears.

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

This triple-decker reflects our evolutionary development from the earliest model (single-celled bacteria) to the latest (George Clooney). Each

Critical thinking is one of our highest achievements besides eating with a fork, so when we emotionally can't get what we want, we have to think our way towards the resolution and this is where we crash and burn.

I'm lucky not to have a nine-to-five job.

1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both.

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.

It is in our biology, this reptilian feeling of wanting what the next guy has.

whenever I achieve a little something and am complimented, shortly thereafter I am swiftly kicked in the ass by karma.

Depressions are very cyclical, they happen once every five years. When I was on TV, yes I was effervescent, you can't fake it. It [depression] comes like the pox.

To compensate for this undercurrent of uselessness, we pretend we're all terribly important and that we have something to bring to the world.

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.

Gandhi said, 'There is more to life than speed'. Unfortunately he didn't tell us what, he just left us hanging while he pranced around in his nappy. To

We're always surprised when something ends; everything ends, so why do we never think it's our turn?

Learning to read faces should be compulsory in schools so you can decipher what people are really thinking.

There are some lucky people who feel they experience happiness when they gaze at a cloud or walk on the beach but the rest of us only get that special tingly buzz when we've bought, won, achieved, hooked or booked something. Then our own brains give us a hit of dopamine, which makes us feel good. We don't need substances; we are our own drug dealers. The

I've told so many lies about my age I don't know how old I am myself.

Why, if we're still breathing and eating, is there such unhappiness? Dissatisfaction is part of the deal of living because simple existence is full of contradictions; we want individuality, to stand out from the crowd, yet we want be part of a tribe. We're driven and busy and yet we want peace. And worst of all, we want things to stay the same despite the fact that everything changes

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

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

In some deep, dark way we all become salacious around a disaster; our mouths water slightly when there's a real emergency. Hurricanes, typhoons, wars, shootings, epidemics; we're a little aroused because now we really have something to think about rather than our monotonous lives; something to take the focus away from our to-do list.

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.