Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 5

51. “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

52. “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

53. “All our mistakes, says Weil, “are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth.”

— Eric Weiner

54. “We lead telephoto lives in a wide-angle world. We never see the big picture.”

— Eric Weiner

55. “Respond to adversity, real or imagined, not with self-pity or hand-wringing, but simply by starting over. Viewed this way, life no longer feels like a narrative gone awry, or a botched ending. None of that is real. There are no endings. Only an infinite chain of beginnings.”

— Eric Weiner

56. “For Socrates, the worst kind of ignorance was the kind that masquerades as knowledge. Better a wide and honest ignorance than a narrow and suspect knowledge.”

— Eric Weiner

57. “Who travels widely needs his wits about him. The stupid should stay at home. And.”

— Eric Weiner

58. “Semua momen dalam kehidupan saya, setiap orang yang saya temui, semua perjalanan yang telah saya tempuh, setiap keberhasilan yang telah saya nikmati, setiap kesalahan yang telah saya buat, setiap kerugian yang saya tanggung adalah bukan masalah.”

— Eric Weiner

59. “Happiness is a by-product, never an objective. It’s an unexpected windfall from a life lived well.”

— Eric Weiner

60. “Set clear goals and channel all your energies into reaching them, the self-help books advise. This approach assumes we’ve identified our destination before beginning our journey. Life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you don’t know where you’re going until you start moving. So move. Start where you are. Make a single brushstroke and see where it leads.”

— Eric Weiner

61. “For Socrates, philosophy and conversation were virtually synonymous.”

— Eric Weiner

62. “Schopenhauer is not an easy man to like – “a nasty piece of work,” says one biographer – but he is an easy man to admire. A lover of art and music, he developed one of philosophy’s most profound, and beautiful, theories of aesthetics, and influenced generations of artists and writers.”

— Eric Weiner

63. “If you do not annoy anyone, you are not a philosopher,” says Peter Kreeft.”

— Eric Weiner

64. “My favorite theory is one I call the Get-Along-or-Die Theory. In warm places, this theory states, life is too easy; your next meal simply falls from a coconut tree. Cooperation with others is optional. In colder places, though, cooperation is mandatory.”

— Eric Weiner

65. “Culture is the enormous yet invisible ocean in which we swim.”

— Eric Weiner

66. “The Porcupine’s Dilemma, as it’s now known, is our dilemma, too. We need others to survive, but others can hurt us. Relationships demand constant course corrections, and even the most skilled navigators get pricked now and then.”

— Eric Weiner

67. “Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

— Eric Weiner

68. “Yes, I will take Japan’s ersatz politeness over Moldova’s genuine rudeness any time. Thank you very much.”

— Eric Weiner

69. “All genuinely creative ideas are initially met with rejection, since they necessarily threaten the status quo. An enthusiastic reception for a new idea is a sure sign that it is not original.”

— Eric Weiner

70. “Ridicule is the price of wisdom.”

— Eric Weiner

71. “Social scientists estimate that about 70 percent of our happiness stems from our relationships, both quantity and quality, with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. During life’s difficult patches, camaraderie blunts our misery; during the good times, it boosts our happiness.”

— Eric Weiner

72. “Seeing is less like photography and more like language. We don’t see the world so much as converse with it.”

— Eric Weiner

73. “The British academic Richard Schoch, in his book The Secrets of Happiness, put it this way: “Your imagination must, to some extent, be found in a realm beyond reason because it begins with imagining a future reality: the self that you might become.”

— Eric Weiner

74. “Our demons do not haunt us at nighttime. They strike in the morning. We are at our most vulnerable when we wake, for that is when the memory of who we are, and how we got here, returns.”

— Eric Weiner

75. “He who tastes, knows,” goes the old Sufi saying. France’s most famous epicure, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, believed that food is the mirror to our souls: “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.”

— Eric Weiner

76. “Socrates says. Recognizing your ignorance is the beginning of all wisdom.”

— Eric Weiner

77. “Clive Bell said, “The essential characteristic of a highly civilized society is not that it is creative but that it is appreciative.”

— Eric Weiner

78. “We must have a different, less transactional, relationship with music. We must experience it from a disinterested perspective. Disinterested but not uninterested. There is a difference. To be uninterested in a piece of music is to be apathetic toward it. To be disinterested is to harbor no expectations, make no demands of the music, yet remain open to the possibility of aesthetic delight.”

— Eric Weiner

79. “Wonder is a skill, one we’re all capable of learning. He.”

— Eric Weiner

80. “Knowledge is always tentative, imperfect. Today’s certainty is tomorrow’s nonsense. “Who can say what is? He can only say how he sees.”

— Eric Weiner

81. “Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is in his heart.”

— Eric Weiner

82. “Canadian happiness researcher John Helliwell believes that quality of government is the single most important variable that explains why some countries are happier than others.”

— Eric Weiner

83. “It’s a silly argument, and unnecessary. Creativity doesn’t happen “in here” or “out there” but in the spaces in between. Creativity is a relationship, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place.”

— Eric Weiner

84. “True listening demands we postpone judgment. When we listen like this, hearing without judging, says Schopenhauer, we “feel positively happy.”

— Eric Weiner

85. “We think the problem rests with the object of our desire when in reality it is the subject – the “I” – that is the problem. It might appear that by craving something you are paying attention to it, but this is an illusion. You are engrossed in your desire for the object, not the object itself. A heroin addict doesn’t crave heroin. He craves the experience of having heroin, and the concomitant relief of not not having heroin.”

— Eric Weiner

86. “Recent research into happiness, or subjective wellbeing, reveals that money does indeed buy happiness. Up to a point. That point, though, is surprisingly low: about fifteen thousand dollars a year. After that, the link between economic growth and happiness evaporates.”

— Eric Weiner

87. “We are more willing to offend someone with whom we have weak ties, and a willingness to offend is an important part of creativity. Strong ties make us feel good, make us feel that we belong, but they also constrict our worldview.”

— Eric Weiner

88. “Duty comes from inside, obligation from outside. When we act out of a sense of duty, we do so voluntarily to lift ourselves, and others, higher. When we act out of obligation, we do so to shield ourselves, and only ourselves, from repercussions.”

— Eric Weiner

89. “Brainstorming sounds like a great idea, but it doesn’t work. Dozens of studies have demonstrated this conclusively. People produce more good ideas – twice as many – alone than they do together. One problem with brainstorming is.”

— Eric Weiner

90. “He was articulating the Stoic notion of “the View from Above.” Imagine yourself hovering high above the earth, looking down at your puny world: the inconsequential traffic and dirty dishes and petty arguments and lost notebooks. Indifferents, all of them. You are nothing. You are everything.”

— Eric Weiner

91. “The music we choose to listen to says more about us than the clothes we wear or the cars we drive or the wine we drink.”

— Eric Weiner

92. “If goodness comes your way, enjoy it. Don’t seek it. Good things come to those who don’t expect good things to come to them.”

— Eric Weiner

93. “Rousseau: his final and unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker.”

— Eric Weiner

94. “Viewing the world in a different way – even an “incorrect,” different way, like Thoreau peering between his legs – enriches our lives.”

— Eric Weiner

95. “Religion is like a knife. If you use it the wrong way you can cut yourself.”

— Eric Weiner

96. “Studies have found that creative people have an especially high tolerance for ambiguity. I suspect this holds true for places of genius as well. Cities such as Athens and Florence and Edinburgh created atmospheres that accepted, and even celebrated, ambiguity.”

— Eric Weiner

97. “Schopenhauer was an Idealist. In the philosophical sense, an Idealist is not someone with high ideals. It is someone who believes that everything we experience is a mental representation of the world, not the world itself. Physical objects only exist when we perceive them. The world is my idea.”

— Eric Weiner

98. “Anything that increases desire increases suffering. Anything that reduces desire – reduces willing, as Schopenhauer puts it – alleviates suffering.”

— Eric Weiner

99. “Places of genius challenge us. They are difficult. They do not earn their place in history with ethnic restaurants or street festivals, but by provoking us, making demands of us. Crazy, unrealistic, beautiful demands.”

— Eric Weiner

100. “Take heart, says Epicurus. Nature has you covered. She has made the necessary desires easy to obtain and the unnecessary ones difficult.”

— Eric Weiner