Top 100 Eric Weiner Quotes
#1. Geniuses are always marginalized to one degree or another. Someone wholly invested in the status quo is unlikely to disrupt it.
Eric Weiner
#2. Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps
located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq.
Eric Weiner
#3. The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth," observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan
Eric Weiner
#4. I've always been a big believer in the power of place. I believe that where we are affects who we are when it comes to happiness, spirituality, economics and creative genius.
Eric Weiner
#5. The narrator, in a voice-of-God tenor, explains the experiment.
Eric Weiner
#6. Who travels widely needs his wits about him. The stupid should stay at home. And
Eric Weiner
#7. I'm interested in genius the way a hungry man is interested in Philadelphia cheesesteaks. I want something. I want a piece of it.
Eric Weiner
#8. All genuinely creative ideas are initially met with rejection, since they necessarily threaten the status quo. An enthusiastic reception for a new idea is a sure sign that it is not original.
Eric Weiner
#9. 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
#10. See what is before you, the thing itself. Analyze later.
Eric Weiner
#11. 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
#12. There's no one on the island telling them they're not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write.
Eric Weiner
#13. And so I do. I have inter course, right there in the Hotel van Walsum dining room. I enjoy it very much, this unhurried dining experience. I sip my beer, stare into space, and, in general, do nothing--until the waiter brings the grilled salmon, indicating that, for now, my inter course is over.
Eric Weiner
#14. Misery is like a gamy piece of meat: not particularly nourishing, certainly not tasty, but still it's something to chew on, and that's better than nothing. I've been chewing on my misery for about forty years now.
Eric Weiner
#15. Studies have found that creative people have an especially high tolerance for ambiguity. I suspect this holds true for places of genius as well. Cities such as Athens and Florence and Edinburgh created atmospheres that accepted, and even celebrated, ambiguity.
Eric Weiner
#16. Psychologists call it "defocused attention," where you broaden your horizons, let your mind float and drift a bit. Coffee keeps us sharp and alert. It's great if you're driving at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's not so great if you're trying to come up with the next violin concerto.
Eric Weiner
#17. Saying grace before a meal. Watching our breath. Repeating the ninety-nine names of Allah. Whirling like a dervish. Prayer. They all have one objective: to get us to pause just long enough to realize that life, your life, is a freaking miracle. The least you can do is pay attention.
Eric Weiner
#18. Hinduism - indeed, most eastern religions - tells us that striving, even striving for happiness, is self-defeating. The moment you try to improve yourself, you've failed. Game over. Yet just lie there like a zombie and you lose, too. What to do?
Eric Weiner
#19. What doesn't kill you not only makes you stronger but also more honest. Laurey
Eric Weiner
#20. Yes, there is something higher than happiness. Love is higher than happiness. Not only does love trump happiness, but in a competition between truth and love, love wins. We must strive for a love that does not bring distortions.
Eric Weiner
#21. Nothing kills creativity faster than a wall.
Eric Weiner
#22. Conversely, the biophilia hypothesis, as Wilson calls it, also explains why we find natural settings so peaceful. It's in our genes. That's why, each year, more people visit zoos than attend all sporting events combined.
Eric Weiner
#23. I've spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself.
Eric Weiner
#24. mandating innovation is an oxymoron, maybe not as absurd as "scheduling spontaneity," but perilously close. I
Eric Weiner
#25. 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
#26. if everyone is a genius, then nobody is. I
Eric Weiner
#27. Joseph Campbell, who when asked what spiritual practice he followed said, "I underline books." Me too.
Eric Weiner
#28. 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 problem with brainstorming is
Eric Weiner
#29. ."The Swiss are uptight and happy. The Thais are laid-back and happy. Icelanders find joy in their binge drinking, Moldovans only misery. Maybe an Indian mind can digest these contradictions, but mine can't.
Eric Weiner
#30. 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
#31. Normally, we think of the religious as people who care more, not less than the rest of us. This is not true, not exactly. The truly religious care more deeply about fewer things and do't give a hoot about the rest.
Eric Weiner
#32. I think we should have more coffeehouses, more cafes, more "third places." More places where people can get together that's not work, not home, and where they can interact with people who are different from them.
Eric Weiner
#33. The problem with finding paradise is that others might find it, too.
Eric Weiner
#34. Hotels are wonderful inventions, but they are not the ideal window to the soul of a nation.
Eric Weiner
#35. When you drink coffee, you become very focused, and in fact, the key to creative genius is to be defocused.
Eric Weiner
#36. It's a silly argument, and unnecessary. Creativity doesn't happen "in here" or "out there" but in the spaces in between. Creativity is a relationship, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place.
Eric Weiner
#37. Unlike the Man with No Cell Phone, the Man Who Can See around Corners owns several, which he places on the table, like talismans. So far, so good. But you can imagine my disappointment when he promptly disabuses me of this seeing-around-corners stuff. "That's all bullshit," he says.
Eric Weiner
#38. When you're stuck on something creatively, you can't solve a problem, you go to a coffee shop.
Eric Weiner
#39. A simple question to identify your true home: where do you want to die?
Eric Weiner
#40. Reason cannot account for those moments in life that "bewilder the intellect yet utterly quiet the heart," as G.K. Chesterton observed.
Eric Weiner
#41. Getting someone behind the wheel of a car is like putting them into deep hypnosis; their true self comes out. In vehicle veritas. Israelis, for instance, drive both defensively and offensively at the same time, which is, come to think of it, the way Israelis do pretty much everything.
Eric Weiner
#42. You need some reason why Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn in the 18th century all flocked to Vienna. What was it about Vienna? They must have known on some level that that is where they would flourish. It's what biologists call "selective migration."
Eric Weiner
#43. Depression, contrary to what we normally believe, is not sadness but an inability to fully feel sadness. Depression is sorrow denied.
Eric Weiner
#44. The coffeehouse is good for genius, and the Viennese coffeehouse is a classic case. Freud had his favorite coffee shop, and so did Gustav Klimt.
Eric Weiner
#45. The point is, the "best" technology or idea doesn't always prevail. Sometimes chance and the law of unintended consequences win out.
Eric Weiner
#46. Silicon Valley's success is built on the carcasses of its failures. In the Valley, failure is fertilizer. Like all fertilizer, though, it must be used wisely by a skilled farmer, otherwise it is useless and smells bad. As
Eric Weiner
#47. Nevertheless, a few brave researchers have bellied up to the laboratory.
Eric Weiner
#48. What is the ideal audio atmosphere for creativity and it turns out it is not complete silence, and it is not a very loud atmosphere, it's something about 70 decibels.
Eric Weiner
#49. A mystery is not a puzzle waiting to be solved, but rather something for which there is no human solution. Mystery's offspring is not frustration but awe, and that sense of awe grows in tandem with knowledge.
Eric Weiner
#50. A Mozart symphony is very much like a Pixar movie - in the sense that Pixar movies are hugely successful because they operate on several levels at the same time.
Eric Weiner
#51. A confused mind is one that is open to the possibility of change.
Eric Weiner
#52. 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
#53. The British academic Richard Schoch, in his book The Secrets of Happiness, put it this way: "Your imagination must, to some extent, be found in a realm beyond reason because it begins with imagining a future reality: the self that you might become.
Eric Weiner
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Money matters but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.
Eric Weiner
#58. 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
#59. Toward the end of his life, Fred Terman wrote that he had no regrets: "If I had my life to live over again, I would play the same record.
Eric Weiner
#60. Don't forget that Mozart worked on commission. He almost always would write something if he knew exactly who was paying for it and where it would be performed. So you can't really separate the creation of genius from the appreciation of it.
Eric Weiner
#61. Perhaps it is not the belief of God that makes us happier but belief in something, anything. How else to explain the fact that the happiest countries in the world--Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands--are hardly religious at all?
Eric Weiner
#63. God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called "human grace." Somewhere along the way, we've lost sight of this.
Eric Weiner
#64. 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
#65. (It's a good thing the gho is so handy, because all Bhutanese men are required to wear one during business hours. Bhutan is the only country in the world with a dress code for men.)
Eric Weiner
#66. 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
#67. Religion is like a knife. If you use it the wrong way you can cut yourself.
Eric Weiner
#68. 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
#69. You look around the world at geniuses, and they don't appear randomly, they appear in genius clusters. Athens in 50 BC, Florence 1500, Silicon Valley today. This is not a coincidence.
Eric Weiner
#70. We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we're counting on some future payback. There is a word for this; love.
Eric Weiner
#71. Perhaps love and attention are really the same thing. One can't exist without the other. The British scholar Avner Offer calls attention "the universal currency of well-being." Attentive people, in other words, are happy people.
Eric Weiner
#72. Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, none of them were born in Vienna. They all moved there. It became a magnet, but what made it magnetized in the first place? There has to be a seed there. In the case of Vienna of about 1780, it was this deep-seated love of music.
Eric Weiner
#74. Humans, even nomadic ones, need a sense of home. Home need not be one place or any place at all, but every home has two essential elements: a sense of community and, even more important, a history.
Eric Weiner
#75. We need to a new word to describe Swiss happiness.
Eric Weiner
#76. What doesn't kill you not only make you stronger, but also more honest.
Eric Weiner
#77. If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time.
Eric Weiner
#78. Thinking about happiness makes us less happy.
Eric Weiner
#79. First of all, nothing good ever came from a beanbag chair. Nothing. I am speaking from personal experience.
Eric Weiner
#80. The great thinkers have long pointed to a connection between creativity and happiness. "Happiness," Kant once said, "is an ideal not of reason but of imagination." In other words, we create our happiness, and the first step in creating anything is to imagine it.
Eric Weiner
#81. Ideas are like bananas. That bananas grow only in tropical regions doesn't make them any less delicious in Scandinavia.
Eric Weiner
#82. 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
#83. Europeans love conferences. Get three Europeans together, and chances are quite high a conference will break out. All that's needed are those little name tags and many, many gallons of Perrier. Geneva
Eric Weiner
#84. The act of underlining always contains an element of self-recognition.
Eric Weiner
#85. My way of thinking is completely different," he says. "I have no such mountains to scale; basically, I find that living itself is a struggle, and if I'm satisfied, if I have just done that, lived well, in the evening I sigh and say, 'It was okay.'
Eric Weiner
#86. Some places are like family. They annoy us to no end, especially during the holidays, but we keep coming back for more because we know, deep in our hearts, that our destinies are intertwined.
Eric Weiner
#87. Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you just met ... In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone.
Eric Weiner
#88. The problems we discover on our own are the ones that motivate us the most
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#89. 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
#90. Genius is not only a what or a who, it is a where. It is grounded in a place every single time.
Eric Weiner
#91. You can be as good as Rembrandt, but if no one discovers you, you will only be a genius in theory.
Eric Weiner
#92. 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
#93. Another thing that Denis likes about Thailand is the concept of jai yen, cool heart. The worst thing one can do in Thailand is to lose one's jai yen. This is why Thais have no patience for uppity foreigners, which is pretty much all foreigners.
Eric Weiner
#94. Hilmar operates at the level of the sublime. The quotidian - parking his car, paying his bills - doesn't interest Hilmar at all. So invariably he parks poorly and forgets to pay his bills.
Eric Weiner
#95. Einstein, like myself, found Bern pleasant but boring. And so I wonder: If the Swiss were more interesting, might he never have daydreamed as much as he did? Might he never have developed the Special Theory of Relativity? In other words, is there something to be said for boredom?
Eric Weiner
#96. Compassion arises spontaneously from wisdom.
Eric Weiner
#97. 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
#98. The measure of a society, he said, is how well it transforms pain and suffering into something worthwhile.
Eric Weiner
#99. People don't go to Starbucks for the coffee - of that I'm pretty sure - they go for the atmosphere, they go for the 70 decibels, they go for the Starbucks effect.
Eric Weiner
#100. 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.
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