Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

154. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

159. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

163. “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

164. “It’s no easier being an artist in modern Florence than it is a philosopher in modern Athens. The past can educate and inspire. It can also imprison. A.”

— Eric Weiner

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

178. “As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energied and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of orgasm of negativity.’... The Brits don’t merely enjoy misery, they get off on it.”

— Eric Weiner

179. “It is this kind of resourcefulness, I think, that explains how this hardy band of Vikings managed to survive more than one thousand years on an island that is about as hospitable to human habitation as the planet Pluto – if Pluto were a planet, that is, which it’s not.”

— Eric Weiner

180. “Tuan is the great unheralded geographer of our time and a man whose writing has accompanied me throughout my journeys. He called one chapter of his autobiography “Salvation by Geography.” The title is tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly, for geography can be our salvation. We are shaped by our environment and, if you take this Taoist belief one step further, you might say we are our environment. Out there. In here. No difference. Viewed that way, life seems a lot less lonely.”

— Eric Weiner

181. “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

182. “Normally, we don’t consider the audience in the genius equation. We assume that they are merely the passive recipients of the gifts that the genius bestows. They are much more than that, though. They are the appreciators of genius, and as art critic Clive Bell said, “The essential characteristic of a highly civilized society is not that it is creative but that it is appreciative.” By that measure, Vienna was the most highly civilized society to grace the planet. Mozart.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

190. “You cannot wonder dispassionately.”

— Eric Weiner

191. “The story of the world is not the story of coups and revolutions. It is the story of lost keys and burnt coffee and a sleeping child in your arms. History is the untallied sum of a million everyday moments.”

— Eric Weiner

192. “It’s not the crime per se that makes places unhappy. It’s the creeping sense of fear that permeates everyone’s lives, even those who have never been – and probably never will be – victims of crime.”

— Eric Weiner

193. “Socrates didn’t publish, and he perished, executed by his fellow Athenians. Again, his alleged crimes.”

— Eric Weiner

194. “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

195. “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

196. “A thought experiment: Imagine a woman growing up on a desert island entirely alone. Does she age? She will develop wrinkles, and inevitably health problems. She will slow down. But is this aging? Beauvoir didn’t think so. For her, aging was cultural, a social verdict rendered by others. If there is no jury, there is no verdict. The girl on the island will experience senescence, biological deterioration, but she will not age.”

— Eric Weiner

197. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

199. “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.”

— Eric Weiner

200. “Hotels are wonderful inventions, but they are not the ideal window to the soul of a nation.”

— Eric Weiner