Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “You cannot wonder dispassionately.”

— Eric Weiner

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

157. “We are like travelers at an inn, just passing through, observing the “No Smoking” sign, leaving the room the way we found it, and perhaps dropping.”

— Eric Weiner

158. “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

159. “As Voltaire said, the best judge of a person is not the answers they give but the questions they ask.”

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

161. “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

162. “Bepergian pulang-pergi bekerja ternyata mengganggu kebahagiaan kita maupun kesehatan jasmani kita. Setiap menit yang dihabiskan di jalanan berarti satu menit lebih sedikit yang bisa kita manfaatkan bersama keluarga dan sahabat.”

— Eric Weiner

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

166. “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

167. “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

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. “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

170. “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

171. “Wonder lingers. Wonder.”

— Eric Weiner

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

175. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

177. “The British scholar Avner Offer calls attention “the universal currency of well-being.” Attentive people, in other words, are happy people. Tashi.”

— Eric Weiner

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

192. “Take your time!”

— Eric Weiner

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

199. “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

200. “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