Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Philosophy is like wine. There are good years and bad years but, in general, the older the better.”

— Eric Weiner

102. “Like Schopenhauer’s hungry readers, we confuse the new with the good, the novel with the valuable.”

— Eric Weiner

103. “Necessity may be the mother of invention, but interdependence is the mother of affection.”

— Eric Weiner

104. “There’s a simple reason for this. The more shots you get at the target, the more likely you’ll eventually score a bull’s-eye, but the more misses you’ll accrue as well. The bull’s-eyes end up in museums and on library shelves, not the misses. Which, when you think about it, is a shame. It feeds the myth that geniuses get it right the first time, that they don’t make mistakes, when, in fact, they make more mistakes than the rest of us. What.”

— Eric Weiner

105. “And then there is religion. What is religion if not a guide to happiness, to bliss? Every religion instructs followers in the ways of happiness, be it in this life or the next, be it through submission, meditation, devotion, or, if you happen to belong to the Jewish or Catholic faith, guilt.”

— Eric Weiner

106. “Live the question?” “Yes, live the question. Have it in the back of your mind a lot of the time. Living a question. Not just trying to fix it. Too often we jump to the solution.”

— Eric Weiner

107. “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

108. “Don’t pay attention to be more productive, a better worker or parent. Pay attention because it is the morally correct course of action, the right thing to do.”

— Eric Weiner

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

112. “I was born in the Year of the Smiley Face: 1963. That’s when a graphic designer from Worcester, Massachusetts, named Harvey Ball invented the now-ubiquitous grinning yellow graphic. Originally, Ball’s creation was designed to cheer up people who worked at, of all places, an insurance company, but it has since become synonymous with the frothy, quintessentially American brand of happiness.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

117. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

119. “It is the absence of anxiety rather than the presence of anything that leads to contentment.”

— Eric Weiner

120. “I begin to see objects only when I leave off understanding them,” says Thoreau. Jaded eyes see little.”

— Eric Weiner

121. “As the British musician Miles Kington said: “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.”

— Eric Weiner

122. “We are like travelers at an inn, just passing through, observing the “No Smoking” sign, leaving the room the way we found it, and perhaps dropping.”

— Eric Weiner

123. “Bepergian pulang-pergi bekerja ternyata mengganggu kebahagiaan kita maupun kesehatan jasmani kita. Setiap menit yang dihabiskan di jalanan berarti satu menit lebih sedikit yang bisa kita manfaatkan bersama keluarga dan sahabat.”

— Eric Weiner

124. “When you wake in the morning, tell yourself: the people you deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, jealous, and surly.”

— Eric Weiner

125. “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

126. “Thoreau is considered a Transcendentalist, a member of a philosophical movement that can be summed up in four words: faith in things unseen.”

— Eric Weiner

127. “This emphasis on self-reliance helps explain why Stoicism appealed to America’s Founding Fathers, and to soldiers everywhere today. It locates responsibility for your happiness squarely on your own shoulders. When a young student complains of a runny nose, Epictetus replies: “Have you no hands? Wipe your own nose, then, and don’t blame God.”

— Eric Weiner

128. “Nietzsche called this option the Dionysian way, after the Greek god who loved wine and theater and life. “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful,” he said. Don’t love life despite the suffering, he says, but because of it.”

— Eric Weiner

129. “The chatter that filled the coffeehouse amounted to a kind of improvisation, like that practiced by musicians and comedy troupes. That form of conversation was far more conducive to generating good ideas than that staple of creativity consultants everywhere: brainstorming. 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.”

— Eric Weiner

130. “Without cold, there would be no coziness.”

— Eric Weiner

131. “The British scholar Avner Offer calls attention “the universal currency of well-being.” Attentive people, in other words, are happy people. Tashi.”

— Eric Weiner

132. “One of the biggest misperceptions about places of genius, I’m discovering, is that they are akin to paradise. They are not. Paradise is antithetical to genius. Paradise makes no demands, and creative genius takes root through meeting demands in new and imaginative ways. “The Athenians matured because they were challenged on all fronts,” said Nietzsche, in a variation of his famous “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger” line.”

— Eric Weiner

133. “McDonald’s caved to the Indian palate and, for the first time, dropped Big Macs and all hamburgers from its menu, since Hindus don’t eat beef. Instead, it serves McAloo Tikki and the McVeggie and a culinary hybrid, the Paneer Salsa Wrap. McDonald’s didn’t change India, as some feared. India changed McDonald’s. And.”

— Eric Weiner

134. “As Epictetus says, “And when something is removed, to give it up easily and immediately, grateful for the times you had the use of it – unless you would rather cry for your nurse and your mummy!” Man up.”

— Eric Weiner

135. “The creator of Bambi was secretly writing pornographic novels on the side. This single fact tells you everything you need to know about turn-of-the-century Vienna, and why it was the perfect place for Sigmund Freud and his far-fetched theories about the human psyche.”

— Eric Weiner

136. “There is no such thing as creativity in the abstract. Likewise, there is no such thing as innovation in the abstract. To describe yourself as an entrepreneur or a disrupter is as meaningless as describing yourself as an athlete or a thinker. Really? What sports do you play? What do you think about? What.”

— Eric Weiner

137. “In the nineteenth century, one hundred years before a country called Qatar existed, Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, wrote of “anomic suicide.” It’s what happens when a society’s moral underpinnings are shaken. And they can be shaken, Durkheim believed, both by great disaster and by great fortune.”

— Eric Weiner

138. “Music speaks of the essence, the thing-in-itself, and so “expresses the innermost nature of all life.”

— Eric Weiner

139. “It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing.”

— Eric Weiner

140. “Rousseau writes, echoing the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s dictum: “All is flux.” The river we step in is never the same twice, nor are we.”

— Eric Weiner

141. “What is honored in a country will be cultivated there.”

— Eric Weiner

142. “See what is before you, the thing itself. Analyze later.”

— Eric Weiner

143. “Toward the end of his life, Fred Terman wrote that he had no regrets: “If I had my life to live over again, I would play the same record.”

— Eric Weiner

144. “To describe yourself as an entrepreneur or a disrupter is as meaningless as describing yourself as an athlete or a thinker. Really? What sports do you play? What do you think about?”

— Eric Weiner

145. “Thai culture, while rare in its distrust of thinking, is not unique. The Inuit frown upon thinking. It indicates someone is either crazy or fiercely stubborn, neither of which is desirable.”

— Eric Weiner

146. “Arriving at answers of the heart demands not only patience but a willingness to sit with your ignorance. Staying with the doubt, the mystery, rather than rushing to solve the problem, to check off another item on your endless to-do list.”

— Eric Weiner

147. “Only the man or woman who wants nothing is free.”

— Eric Weiner

148. “We believe our eyes capture images from the world like a camera, then relay these images to our brain. Our eyes “photograph,” say, the coffee mug in front of us. It’s a nice model. It is also wrong. Seeing is less like photography and more like language. We don’t see the world so much as converse with it. What is that? Looks like a coffee mug, you say? Let me check my database and get back to you. Yep, it’s a.”

— Eric Weiner

149. “Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don’t like the way things are, they aren’t interesting enough for you, so you decide- and boredom is a decision that you are bored.”

— Eric Weiner

150. “The problems we discover on our own are the ones that motivate us the most.”

— Eric Weiner