Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Happiness contemplated is happiness lost.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “Philosophy is like wine. There are good years and bad years but, in general, the older the better.”

— Eric Weiner

110. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

119. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

123. “Yet the ailment is virtually nonexistent in Iceland. There is a higher prevalence of the disorder in the northeastern United States than in Iceland. Perplexed by the results, psychologists theorize that over the centuries Icelanders developed a genetic immunity to the disease. Those who got SAD died out, taking their gene pool with them. Survival of the felicitous.”

— 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. “The philosopher Alan Watts, were he alive today, would nod knowingly when told of that experiment. Watts once said, “Only bad music has any meaning.” Meaning necessarily entails words, symbols. They point to something other than themselves. Good music doesn’t point anywhere. It just is. Likewise, only unhappiness has meaning. That’s why we feel compelled to talk about it and have so many words to draw upon. Happiness doesn’t require words.”

— Eric Weiner

128. “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

129. “Wonder lingers. Wonder.”

— Eric Weiner

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

133. “The opening sentence is a doozy: “The world is my idea.”

— Eric Weiner

134. “Epicurus thought otherwise. He considered pleasure the highest good. Everything else – fame, money, and even virtue – mattered only to the extent they furthered pleasure.”

— Eric Weiner

135. “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

136. “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

137. “In a fascinating study, psychologist David McClelland found a direct link between Greek accomplishments and the prominence of “achievement themes” in the literature of the day. The greater the amount of such inspirational literature, the greater their “real-world” achievements. Conversely, when the frequency of inspirational literature diminished, so did their accomplishments. At.”

— Eric Weiner

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

143. “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

144. “Ideas are like bananas. That bananas grow only in tropical regions doesn’t make them any less delicious in Scandinavia.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

150. “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