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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

105. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

128. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

132. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

142. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

144. “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

145. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

147. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner