Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “Wonder lingers. Wonder.”

— Eric Weiner

160. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

170. “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

171. “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

172. “When people from similar backgrounds get together, are isolated from dissenting views, and are trying to please a strong leader, the result is consensus around the preferred position, even if it is clearly wrongheaded.”

— Eric Weiner

173. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

175. “Take your time!”

— Eric Weiner

176. “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

177. “Jacob explains that he distinguishes ordinary questioning from “deep questioning.” Ordinary questioning skates along the surface, like Siri. Deep questioning is slow and immersive.”

— Eric Weiner

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

197. “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

198. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

200. “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