Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Paganism, it turns out, was the original Icelandic religion before a mass conversion in the year 1000. That was largely seen as a business decision, and Icelanders have never been particularly good Christians. They attend church if someone is born or wed or dies, but otherwise they are, as one Icelander put it, “atheists with good intentions.”

— Eric Weiner

152. “Also, the advice we were given as children when confronted with failure, “forget it and move on,” is dead wrong. “Remember it and move on” is the way of the genius. I.”

— Eric Weiner

153. “Khaldoun believed that the great curse of civilization is not war or famine but humidity: “When the moisture, with its evil vapors ascends to the brain, the mind and body and the ability to think are dulled. The result is stupidity, carelessness and a general intemperance.”

— Eric Weiner

154. “If you’ve ever had a rational thought or asked Why? or gazed at the night sky in silent wonder, then you have had a Greek moment.”

— Eric Weiner

155. “Good walkers, all of them. None, though, compares with Rousseau. He’d regularly walk twenty miles in a single day.”

— Eric Weiner

156. “Every institution and social form we have is devoted either to solving problems or providing pleasure,” Needleman says.”

— Eric Weiner

157. “We’ve amassed enough accolades, saved enough money, to know how meaningless they are. Sisyphus at twenty-five still holds out hope that maybe, maybe this time the rock won’t roll down the hill. Sisyphus at seventy-five has no such illusions.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

159. “Hutton’s world consisted of his rocks and his friends. The rocks provided the raw material he needed to formulate his theories; the friends provided the guidance he needed to articulate those theories.”

— Eric Weiner

160. “And now it is time to go, I to die, and you to live, but which of us goes to a better thing is unknown to all but God,” he said.”

— Eric Weiner

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

167. “The dynamic works both ways. Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are. As the Vedas say, “What you see, you become.”

— Eric Weiner

168. “To know – truly know – what it means to be a good father is to be one. It was.”

— Eric Weiner

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

172. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

185. “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

186. “You cannot wonder dispassionately.”

— Eric Weiner

187. “What distinguishes the genius from the also-ran is not necessarily how many times she succeeds but how many times she starts over. Music.”

— Eric Weiner

188. “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

189. “Old age is a large immovable object and closer than it appears. Encounters with it are never gentle. You do not brush up against old age. You do not sideswipe old age. You collide with it head on.”

— Eric Weiner

190. “British philosopher Alan Watts observed, a sense of wonder “distinguishes men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.”

— Eric Weiner

191. “But actually these two sides go together – you cannot have what is ‘in here’ unless you have what is ’out there.”

— Eric Weiner

192. “Philosophy produces more problems than it solves. That is its nature.”

— Eric Weiner

193. “Examining the sickly body politic of Athens, Epicurus posited a simple diagnosis: we fear what is not harmful and desire what is not necessary. What do we fear the most? he asked. The gods and death.”

— Eric Weiner

194. “Civic life, though, was not optional, and Aristotle tells me the Athenians had a word for those who refused to participate in public affairs: idiotes. It is where we get our word idiot.”

— Eric Weiner

195. “Read the journals. Leslie Wilson’s words lodge in my brain like a bad Top 40 song you can’t shake. Thoreau kept a journal most of his adult life, some two million words spanning fourteen volumes.”

— Eric Weiner

196. “How we pursue the goal of happiness matters at least as much, perhaps more, than the goal itself.”

— Eric Weiner

197. “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

198. “Cosimo was the Bill Gates of his day. He spent the first half of his life making a fortune and the second half giving it away. He found the latter half much more satisfying, once confiding in a friend that his greatest regret was that he did not begin giving away his wealth ten years earlier. Cosimo recognized money for what it is: potential energy, with a limited shelf life. Either spend it or watch it slowly deplete, like yesterday’s birthday balloon. Under.”

— Eric Weiner

199. “Bertrand Russell, who lived until the age of ninety-seven, suggests expanding the circle of your interests, making them “wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”

— Eric Weiner

200. “You can tell a lot about a country by the way people drive. Getting someone behind the wheel of a car is like putting them into deep hypnosis; their true self comes out.”

— Eric Weiner