Arianna Huffington has long been a name in the career, journalism, and wellness spaces. While her name first rose to prominence as the wife of congressman Michael Huffington in the 1990, Huffington herself ran for office later on in the 2003 California gubernatorial election. From there, she went on to fund the ultra-successful progressive news website The Huffington Post.
These days, Huffington is is the CEO of Thrive Global, a company that aims to combat burnout using a whole, human-first approach.
All this to say: Huffington is an expert in success, yes, but she's also an expert in self-care, wellness, and not letting herself getting burned out—which is why she serves as such an inspirational figure to so many. Here are 40 of her best quotes on success, self-care, and more.
Arianna Huffington Quotes
1. “By helping us keep the world in perspective, sleep gives us a chance to refocus on the essence of who we are. And in that place of connection, it is easier for the fears and concerns of the world to drop away.”
2. “I see some people stay in one place because it’s convenient or it’s comfortable. But they’re missing out on their passion,”
3. "It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes."
4. “It’s our collective delusion that overwork and burnout are the price we must pay in order to succeed.”
5. "I don't look back. I don't look forward. I try to just be here, now."
6. "Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me."
7. “There is nothing like becoming a mom to fill you with fear.”
8. “My ritual is to turn off all my devices 30 minutes before I’m going to go to sleep and charge them outside my room.”
9. “Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life.”
10. “Don’t buy society’s definition of success because it’s not working for anyone.”
11. “If you don’t learn to delegate as a leader, if you don’t trust your leadership team, you’re never going to have a star leadership team. No star leader is going to join you if you’re going to micromanage everything.”
12. "Treat people like family, and they will be loyal and give their all."
13. "The more we refuse to buy into our inner critics—and our external ones too—the easier it will get to have confidence in our choices, and to feel comfortable with who we are—as women and as mothers."
14. “Technology has made it harder to connect with our own wisdom and to connect to a sense of wonder with the world.”
15. “It’s very hard to be resilient when we’re run down.”
16. “We need to stop talking about work-life balance. The two are completely integrated.”
17. "A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
18. “When we shrink our whole reality down to pending projects, when our life becomes our endless to-do list, it's difficult to put them aside each night and let ourselves fall asleep and connect with something deeper.”
19. "If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world."
20. “Life is a dance between making it happen and letting it happen.”
21. "We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes—understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success."
22. “When we prioritize our well-being, everything else in our life gets better, including our products, including our performance at work, including our success.”
23. “People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills, when it is possible for you to retreat into yourself any time you want.”
24. “These two threads that run through our life—one pulling us into the world to achieve and make things happen, the other pulling us back from the world to nourish and replenish ourselves—can seem at odds, but in fact they reinforce each other.”
25. “Take risks. Failure is a stepping stone to success.”
26. “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 is actually improved when our lives include time for renewal, wisdom, wonder, and giving. That would have saved me a lot of unnecessary stress, burnout, and exhaustion.”
27. “We may not be able to witness our own eulogy, but we’re actually writing it all the time, every day.”
28. “Right now we take better care of our smartphones than we take care of ourselves. I bet everyone here knows how much battery remains in their phones right now.”
29. “Remember what you’re grateful for, or simple consciously breathe. It will dramatically change the quality of your day.”
30. “It’s very hard to be resilient when we’re run down.”
31. “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.”
32. “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.”
33. “To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a third measure of success that goes beyond money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.”
34. “But you have to do what you dream of doing even while you’re afraid.”
35. “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.”
36. “Countless things in our daily lives can awaken the almost constant state of wonder we knew as children. But sometimes to see them we must look through a different set of eyes.”
37. “We all have within us the ability to move from struggle to grace.”
38. “Don’t just climb the ladder of success—a ladder that leads, after all, to higher and higher levels of stress and burnout—but chart a new path to success, remaking it in a way that includes not just the conventional metrics of money and power, but a third metric that includes well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving, so that the goal is not just to succeed but to thrive.”
39. “Music can reach those places where words alone can’t go.”
40. “I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.”
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