Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “Happiness contemplated is happiness lost.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

109. “We’re like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys in a lighted alleyway. “Did you lose them here?” asks a passerby. “No. I lost them over there,” he says, pointing to a dark parking lot. “Then why are you looking here?” “This is where the light is.” Not Schopenhauer.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

111. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

113. “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

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

— 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. “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

118. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

120. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

124. “Orang-orang di Amerika Serikat tidak mencemari lingkungan sebagian karena takut didenda. Orang-orang di Bhutan tidak mencemari lingkungan karena mereka takut kepada dewata rumah kaca.”

— Eric Weiner

125. “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

126. “Happiness is, as Nathaniel Hawthorne observed, the butterfly that alights on our shoulder, unbidden.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

128. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “We live in an age where we’re told everything is up to us. If you’re not smarter or richer or thinner it’s because you’re not trying hard enough. If you get sick, it’s because of something you ate, or didn’t eat, or a medical test you failed to get, or did get, or an exercise you didn’t do, or overdid, or a vitamin you did or did not take. The message is clear: you are in control of your destiny. Are you, though?”

— Eric Weiner

137. “The Scots studied the past to understand the present, and of course improve it. Like the ancient Greeks and the Chinese, they knew that those who lack a keen awareness of history are destined to “remain forever children in understanding,” as David Hume put it. Genius requires not only an accelerator but also a rearview mirror.”

— Eric Weiner

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “If our life – indeed the entire universe – does repeat, what do we control? Not our actions, Nietzsche thought, but our attitude. His philosophy was, at its heart, “an experiment in reorienting oneself within a world of total uncertainty.” Typically, we run from uncertainty and toward certainty. But that, says Nietzsche, is not an immutable fact. It is a value, and anything we value we can revalue.”

— Eric Weiner

143. “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

144. “Wonder lingers. Wonder.”

— Eric Weiner

145. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

147. “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

148. “Some 1,300 years later, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre metaphorically spat on the notion of communal bliss by declaring, “Hell is other people.”

— Eric Weiner

149. “Good enough represents an attitude of deep gratitude toward whatever happens at you.”

— Eric Weiner

150. “Take your time!”

— Eric Weiner