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

51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Just as not all butterflies produce a hurricane, not all outbreaks of bubonic plague produce a Renaissance.”

— Eric Weiner

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

62. “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

63. “Ridicule is the price of wisdom.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

69. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

71. “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

72. “The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere”. That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn’t want to live in the perfect place, either. “A life time of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman.”

— Eric Weiner

73. “As we age, we become more intensely ourselves.”

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

77. “We need to a new word to describe Swiss happiness.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “Nothing kills creativity faster than a wall.”

— Eric Weiner

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

87. “The roots of the word “compete” are the Latin competure, which means to “seek with.”

— Eric Weiner

88. “The expectation of a reward or evaluation, even a positive evaluation, squelched creativity.”

— Eric Weiner

89. “Indians, and Indian men in particular, are great sitters. World-class. I can’t compete with them, but I do my best. At some point, Chandra, the friendly Martian, will suggest we go to Khoshy’s, a coffee shop, and continue our sitting there.”

— Eric Weiner

90. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

92. “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

93. “Happiness contemplated is happiness lost.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

96. “This less-is-more phenomenon holds true not only for individuals but for entire nations. A good example is the “oil curse,” also known as the paradox of plenty. Nations rich in natural resources, especially oil, tend to stagnate culturally and intellectually, as even a brief visit to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait reveals. The citizens of these nations have everything so they create nothing. China.”

— Eric Weiner

97. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

99. “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

100. “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