Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 5

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

103. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “Happiness contemplated is happiness lost.”

— Eric Weiner

112. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

123. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

130. “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

131. “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

132. “Music is playing. We will, we will rock you. But no one will be rocked here. There will be no revolution. People are too comfortable, and comfort is the revolutionaries’ worst enemy.”

— Eric Weiner

133. “Geniuses are always marginalized to one degree or another. Someone wholly invested in the status quo is unlikely to disrupt it.”

— Eric Weiner

134. “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

135. “Pining for a different role is futile and will only cause you to suffer needlessly, like the dog dragged by the cart. We must learn, say the Stoics, “to desire what we have.” That sounds odd, I realize. Isn’t desire, by definition, a yearning for something we lack? How can we desire what we already have? Nietzsche, I think, answers the question best. Don’t resign yourself to your fate. Don’t accept your fate. Love it. Desire it. The.”

— Eric Weiner

136. “We scoop trivial pleasures atop a mountain of pain, and wonder why we’re not happy.”

— Eric Weiner

137. “This dynamic explains why we see spikes in professions at certain times and in certain places. The number of geniuses who appear in any given field at any given time is a function not of the pool of talent available but, rather, the attractiveness of the field.”

— Eric Weiner

138. “Something wasn’t right though. That golden rule of positive psychology, hedonic adaptation, states that no matter what tragedy or good fortune befalls us, we adapt. We return to our “set point” or close enough anyway. It’s been fifteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why hasn’t Luba adapted?”

— Eric Weiner

139. “The world is one. When we help another person, we help ourselves. We feel the pain of others the way we feel the pain in our finger. Not as something foreign, but as part of us.”

— Eric Weiner

140. “Questions, not the eyes, are the true windows to the soul. As Voltaire said, the best judge of a person is not the answers they give but the questions they ask.”

— Eric Weiner

141. “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

142. “Too much recollection isn’t good. We risk remaining shackled to our past selves: forever the heroic soldier or beautiful young woman. This kind of.”

— Eric Weiner

143. “Corollary Number Two: The unexamined life may not be worth living, but neither is the overexamined one.”

— Eric Weiner

144. “Better to fight for your principles than pretend you don’t have any.”

— Eric Weiner

145. “Nevertheless, a few brave researchers have bellied up to the laboratory.”

— Eric Weiner

146. “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

147. “Aristotle would clear up this moral confusion in an Athenian minute. Happiness, he believed, meant not only feeling good but doing good. Thus, the pedophile and the suicide bomber only thought they were happy. In fact, they were not happy at all.”

— Eric Weiner

148. “Reason, Hume argued, doesn’t determine what we want but only how we obtain it.”

— Eric Weiner

149. “Like the Japanese, the Stoics know “all things everywhere are perishable.” They see this fact as cause for neither sadness, like many of us, nor celebration, like the Japanese, but merely a fact of life. Rationally there is nothing we can do about it, so best not to worry. Marcus reminds us that all we cherish will one day disappear like leaves on a tree so we must “beware lest delight in them leads you to cherish them so dearly that their loss would destroy your peace of mind.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner