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Arianna Huffington Quotes

20 quotes from Arianna Huffington — Co-founder of The Huffington Post (sold to AOL for $315M) and founder/CEO of Thrive Global, a wellness company..

Don't buy society's definition of success because it's not working for anyone.

Success

Success is commonly defined as money and power, but increasingly that's not enough. It's almost like a two-legged stool where you fall over if that's all you measure your life by.

Success

To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power.

Success

Success is not about how much money you make. It is about the difference you make in people's lives.

Impact

Have you noticed that when we die, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success?

Reflection

I wish I could go back and tell myself that not only is there no trade-off between living a well-rounded life and high performance, it is actually improved when our lives include time for renewal, wisdom, wonder, and giving.

Well-being

You have to do what you dream of doing even while you're afraid.

Courage

Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It's the mastery of fear. It's about getting up one more time than we fall down.

Courage

Life is a dance between making it happen and letting it happen.

Life

The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become fearless is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly – indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.

Perfectionism

We think mistakenly that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of the time we put in.

Success

When we believe in something, we got to give it everything we have.

Belief

I hadn't really thought of competing to be elected to an office at the Union. That seemed like not something I could ever achieve. The decision to learn to speak was very deliberate. The fact that I ended up becoming president of the Union was completely accidental.

Arianna Huffington, to Tim Ferriss, 2018

It creates communities almost every single time it twitches. That's not what any of us thought it would do when it started.

Nora Ephron, as quoted in USA Today, 2011

People look for retreats for themselves in the country, by the coast, or in the hills. There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. So constantly give yourself this retreat and renew yourself.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, as quoted by Huffington

My mother said, 'Okay, let's find out how you can get to Cambridge. I'm sure we can make that happen.' She even said to me one day, 'I got us these really cheap tickets and we can go and see Cambridge.' Not see anybody at Cambridge, just go see. It was like an early form of visualization.

Arianna Huffington, to Tim Ferriss, 2018

That morning when I stood up from my desk to go get a sweater — I remember because I was cold — I collapsed and hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone. That was this amazing wake-up call that I'm incredibly grateful for right now, because it led me to trying to understand why that happened.

Arianna Huffington, on her collapse, to Reid Hoffman on Masters of [Scale](/mental-models/scale)

How about instead of trying to live forever, trying to improve how you spend your day?

Arianna Huffington, CNBC Changemakers podcast, 2025

When I get six hours, my decision-making is 5 to 20 percent less good than when I've had eight hours. My value is entirely dependent on the quality of my decisions.

Arianna Huffington, on sleep and decision-making, quoting Jeff Bezos

Failure is not the opposite of success. It's a stepping stone to success. She made my sister and me feel very comfortable with failing. It is not a big deal. Taking risks was part of life and failing was part of life.

Arianna Huffington, to Tim Ferriss, on her mother's philosophy

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