Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

156. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

169. “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

170. “You cannot wonder dispassionately.”

— Eric Weiner

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

176. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “Wonder lingers. Wonder.”

— Eric Weiner

188. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

190. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

192. “Imagine, says Epictetus, you handed over your body to a stranger on the street. Absurd, right? Yet that’s what we do with our mind every day. We cede our sovereignty to others, allowing them to colonize our mind. We need to evict them.”

— Eric Weiner

193. “Yes, failure is part of the mix, he says, but it is a means, not an end. If you fail repeatedly, and in the same manner, you’re an idiot, not a genius.”

— Eric Weiner

194. “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

195. “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

196. “Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, concludes his book The Conquest of Happiness by describing a happy person thus: “Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joy that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those who will come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.”

— Eric Weiner

197. “Moldovans, most of whom will never be able to afford the products advertised – unless they sell a kidney. Joseph Epstein, in his book on envy, described the entire advertising industry as “a vast and intricate envy-producing machine.” In Moldova, all of that envy has nowhere to dissipate; it just accumulates, like so much toxic waste.”

— Eric Weiner

198. “Happiness is a choice. Not an easy choice, not always a desirable one, but a choice nonetheless.”

— Eric Weiner

199. “By talking to others he learned how to converse with himself.”

— Eric Weiner

200. “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