Arianna Huffington Quotes

To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric, a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.

Montaigne: “To practice death is to practice freedom.71 A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” Being a slave to our job and our status in the world makes it much harder to put our day behind us and surrender to sleep.

Don't forget: our media culture failed to serve the public interest by missing (with a few honourable exceptions) the two biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the Iraq war and the financial melt­down. We've had far too many autopsies and not enough biopsies.

Isn't it really, really offensive that our president is simply not telling us the truth about what's happening in Iraq? For me, that was one of the most offensive things about the entire convention. There was no truth-telling there. It was all a complete masquerade. Both about Iraq and about the domestic economy... The problem is not that the people think the Democratic Party is not sufficiently hawkish; it's the problem that they are not sufficiently bold and sufficiently visionary. They need to go back to Bobby Kennedy and 1968. That was the last time that a Democrat truly inspired red states and blue states and everybody and the millions of people out there.

When your house is burning down, you don't worry about the remodeling.

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 afterlife.

Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men.

The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway.

America is a country ready to be taken—in fact, longing to be taken—by political leaders ready to restore democracy and trust to the political process.

According to a study from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, sleep deprivation reduces our emotional intelligence, self-regard, assertiveness, sense of independence, empathy toward others, the quality of our interpersonal relationships, positive thinking, and impulse control.

But, if we let it, technology can also add a lot of noise and distraction that get in the way of our most fundamental creative capabilities — instead of freeing us, it can consume us.

As in our own lives, the story’s outward form must track the inner journey of the hero. When we disconnect from our inner selves and identify exclusively with our ego, that’s when we lose our connection with life’s meaning and purpose and are left facing a void that we try to fill with more money, more sex, more power, more fame. And as we see in all modern literature, when the ego separates itself from the self, the end is always frustration and destruction — whether in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. We can use the power of story, and our primal need for it, to redefine our own narrative. We’re all on a journey, a voyage, a quest to slay the monster, free the princess, and return home. But too often the goals we seek — those that the conventional notions of success tell us we should be seeking — take us down dead ends, searching for the meaning of our lives in all the wrong places. Mindfulness helps us become aware of our own story.

Those who can sit in a chair, undistracted for hours, mastering subjects and creating things will rule the world — while the rest of us frantically and futilely try to keep up with texts, tweets, and other incessant interruptions.

Socrates defines his life’s mission as awakening the Athenians to the supreme importance of attending to their souls. His timeless plea that we connect to ourselves remains the only way for any of us to truly thrive.

A friend of mine has a ritual: He writes a poem every day with his morning coffee.