Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We can’t love a place or a person if we always have one foot out the door.”

— Eric Weiner

2. “Happiness is not a noun or a verb. It’s a conjunction. Connective tissue.”

— Eric Weiner

3. “A confused mind is one that is open to the possibility of change.”

— Eric Weiner

4. “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.”

— Eric Weiner

5. “Perhaps it’s true you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scene of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fateful decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal.”

— Eric Weiner

6. “Joseph Campbell, who when asked what spiritual practice he followed said, “I underline books.” Me too.”

— Eric Weiner

7. “If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time.”

— Eric Weiner

8. “Money matters but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.”

— Eric Weiner

9. “I’ve always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.”

— Eric Weiner

10. “Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, none of them were born in Vienna. They all moved there. It became a magnet, but what made it magnetized in the first place? There has to be a seed there. In the case of Vienna of about 1780, it was this deep-seated love of music.”

— Eric Weiner

11. “I think we should have more coffeehouses, more cafes, more “third places.” More places where people can get together that’s not work, not home, and where they can interact with people who are different from them.”

— Eric Weiner

12. “People don’t go to Starbucks for the coffee – of that I’m pretty sure – they go for the atmosphere, they go for the 70 decibels, they go for the Starbucks effect.”

— Eric Weiner

13. “Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it’s demanding music of him.”

— Eric Weiner

14. “Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.”

— Eric Weiner

15. “Silicon Valley’s success is built on the carcasses of its failures. In the Valley, failure is fertilizer. Like all fertilizer, though, it must be used wisely by a skilled farmer, otherwise it is useless and smells bad. As.”

— Eric Weiner

16. “Wonder” is a wonderful word. It’s impossible to say it aloud without smiling.”

— Eric Weiner

17. “Psychologists call it “defocused attention,” where you broaden your horizons, let your mind float and drift a bit. Coffee keeps us sharp and alert. It’s great if you’re driving at 3 o’clock in the morning. It’s not so great if you’re trying to come up with the next violin concerto.”

— Eric Weiner

18. “A mystery is not a puzzle waiting to be solved, but rather something for which there is no human solution. Mystery’s offspring is not frustration but awe, and that sense of awe grows in tandem with knowledge.”

— Eric Weiner

19. “The coffeehouse is good for genius, and the Viennese coffeehouse is a classic case. Freud had his favorite coffee shop, and so did Gustav Klimt.”

— Eric Weiner

20. “I’ve spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself.”

— Eric Weiner

21. “Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It’s a conjunction. Connective tissue.”

— Eric Weiner

22. “Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps – located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq.”

— Eric Weiner

23. “Part of positive psychology is about being positive, but sometimes laughter and clowns are not appropriate. Some people don’t want to be happy, and that’s okay. They want meaningful lives, and those are not always the same as happy lives.”

— Eric Weiner

24. “I’ve always been a big believer in the power of place. I believe that where we are affects who we are when it comes to happiness, spirituality, economics and creative genius.”

— Eric Weiner

25. “There’s no one on the island telling them they’re not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write.”

— Eric Weiner

26. “When you’re stuck on something creatively, you can’t solve a problem, you go to a coffee shop.”

— Eric Weiner

27. “You need some reason why Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn in the 18th century all flocked to Vienna. What was it about Vienna? They must have known on some level that that is where they would flourish. It’s what biologists call “selective migration.””

— Eric Weiner

28. “For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that- try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn’t the right country for you- just won’t leave you in peace.”

— Eric Weiner

29. “When you drink coffee, you become very focused, and in fact, the key to creative genius is to be defocused.”

— Eric Weiner

30. “It’s not what we believe that makes us happy but the act of believing. In anything.”

— Eric Weiner

31. “Some places are like family. They annoy us to no end, especially during the holidays, but we keep coming back for more because we know, deep in our hearts, that our destinies are intertwined.”

— Eric Weiner

32. “You look around the world at geniuses, and they don’t appear randomly, they appear in genius clusters. Athens in 50 BC, Florence 1500, Silicon Valley today. This is not a coincidence.”

— Eric Weiner

33. “We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we’re counting on some future payback. There is a word for this; love.”

— Eric Weiner

34. “We are shaped not only by our current geography but by our ancestral one as well. Americans, for instance, retain a frontier spirit even though the only frontier that remains is that vast open space between the SUV and strip mall. We are our past.”

— Eric Weiner

35. “Believing in everything looks a lot like believing in nothing.”

— Eric Weiner

36. “Normally, we think of the religious as people who care more, not less than the rest of us. This is not true, not exactly. The truly religious care more deeply about fewer things and do’t give a hoot about the rest.”

— Eric Weiner

37. “God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this.”

— Eric Weiner

38. “A Mozart symphony is very much like a Pixar movie – in the sense that Pixar movies are hugely successful because they operate on several levels at the same time.”

— Eric Weiner

39. “I’m interested in genius the way a hungry man is interested in Philadelphia cheesesteaks. I want something. I want a piece of it.”

— Eric Weiner

40. “The person attuned to beauty will find it in a garbage dump while “the fault-finder will find fault even in paradise.”

— Eric Weiner

41. “I would love to think there is a direct relationship between coffee and genius, but they’ve done studies, and if anything, caffeine probably makes you a little less creative.”

— Eric Weiner

42. “Genius is not only a what or a who, it is a where. It is grounded in a place every single time.”

— Eric Weiner

43. “What is the ideal audio atmosphere for creativity and it turns out it is not complete silence, and it is not a very loud atmosphere, it’s something about 70 decibels.”

— Eric Weiner

44. “Don’t forget that Mozart worked on commission. He almost always would write something if he knew exactly who was paying for it and where it would be performed. So you can’t really separate the creation of genius from the appreciation of it.”

— Eric Weiner

45. “No wonder Nietzsche calls Eternal Recurrence “the heaviest burden.” Nothing is weightier than eternity. If everything recurs infinitely, then there are no light moments, no trivial ones. Every moment, no matter how inconsequential, possesses the same weight and mass as others. “All actions are equally great and small.”

— Eric Weiner

46. “Nor would the Athenian golden age have happened had the Persians not first sacked Athens, burning it to the ground, and clearing the way for Pericles’s ambitious rebuilding. It is the law of unintended consequences on a grand scale.”

— Eric Weiner

47. “Divergent thinking is when we come up with multiple, unexpected solutions to problems. Divergent thinking is spontaneous and free-flowing. Convergent thinking, by contrast, is more linear and entails a narrowing, rather than an expanding, of your options. Convergent thinkers are trying to find the one correct answer to a question. Divergent thinkers reframe the question. The.”

— Eric Weiner

48. “These empty desires cause the most suffering, Epicurus thought, since they are difficult to obtain. “It is better for you to lie upon a bed of straw and be free of fear, than to have a golden couch and an opulent table, yet be troubled in mind.”

— Eric Weiner

49. “Fighting, done properly, is productive. Both sides can arrive not only at a win-win solution but something more: a solution that neither would have found had they not fought in the first place.”

— Eric Weiner

50. “Music is not what I think it is, Schopenhauer tells me. It does not convey emotion. It conveys the essence, the container, of emotions without the content. When we listen to music, we perceive not a particular sadness or a particular joy but sadness itself and joy itself – “the extracted quintessence of these feelings,” says Schopenhauer.”

— Eric Weiner