Top 200 Eric Weiner Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I begin to see objects only when I leave off understanding them,” says Thoreau. Jaded eyes see little.”

— Eric Weiner

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “Music speaks of the essence, the thing-in-itself, and so “expresses the innermost nature of all life.”

— Eric Weiner

163. “Places of genius challenge us. They are difficult. They do not earn their place in history with ethnic restaurants or street festivals, but by provoking us, making demands of us. Crazy, unrealistic, beautiful demands.”

— Eric Weiner

164. “The creator of Bambi was secretly writing pornographic novels on the side. This single fact tells you everything you need to know about turn-of-the-century Vienna, and why it was the perfect place for Sigmund Freud and his far-fetched theories about the human psyche.”

— Eric Weiner

165. “Without cold, there would be no coziness.”

— Eric Weiner

166. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

174. “You cannot wonder dispassionately.”

— Eric Weiner

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

186. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

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

— Eric Weiner

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Eric Weiner

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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