Eric Weiner Quotes & Sayings

That's why we feel so disoriented, irritated even, when these touchstones from our past are altered. We don't like it when our hometown changes, even in small ways. It's unsettling. The playground! It used to be right here, I swear. Mess with our hometown, and you're messing with our past, with who we are. Nobody likes that. — Eric Weiner

Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: "Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise." We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. — Eric Weiner

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

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

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

Music was literally in the air at the time, the Vienna of 1780. Everybody played music, classical music. There were in fact so many musicians that in apartment buildings people had to come up with a schedule - you practice at 5 p.m., I'll practice at 6 p.m. That way the music didn't collide with one another. — Eric Weiner

We need to a new word to describe Swiss happiness. — Eric Weiner

Hotels are wonderful inventions, but they are not the ideal window to the soul of a nation. — Eric Weiner

Everyone here has a different gripe, large or small. The bad fish, for instance, which I'm told is caught in polluted rivers and can be deadly. The biggest complaint, though, is the lack of queuing. "It's not first-come, first-served, it's most-obnoxious, first-served," says Abby. The lack of trust is another popular gripe. "Friends don't even trust friends. If bad things happen to their friends, people think, 'Good, maybe it won't happen to me,' " says one volunteer. Corruption is another theme. Paying professors for passing grades is widespread, so much so that Moldovans won't go to doctors under thirty-five years old. They suspect - with good reason - that they bought their degrees. Thus, the radius of mistrust is widened. — Eric Weiner

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

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

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

All around me I hear the pleasant chortle of Dutch. It sounds vaguely familiar, though I can't imagine why. Then it dawns on me. Dutch sounds exactly like English spoken backward! ...
I wonder if I recorded someone speaking Dutch and played that backward, it would sound like regular English! — Eric Weiner

And yet, over the years I've met so many people like Jared who seem to be more at home, happier, living in a country on of their birth ... Not political refugees, escaping a repressing regime, nor economic refugees, crossing a border in search of a better-paying job. The are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually hedonic refugees have an ephiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country. — Eric Weiner

This, I realize, is what life is like for most Thais. They are not in control of their fates. A terrifying thought, yes, but also a liberating one. For if nothing you do matters, then life suddenly feels a lot less heavy. It's just one big game. And as any ten-year-old will tell you, the best games are the ones where everyone gets to play. And where you can play again and again, for free. Lots of cool special effects are nice, too. — Eric Weiner

Socrates pioneered conversation as a means of intellectual exploration, of questioning assumptions, ones so deeply ingrained we dont even know we have them. — Eric Weiner

thambos, "that reverential terror and awe aroused by the proximity of any supernatural force or being which one discerns, — Eric Weiner

As early as the 1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that America was populated by "so many lucky men, restless in the midst of their abundance." Or, as Kevin Rushby writes in his recent history of paradise, "All talk of paradise only starts when something has been lost." What have we lost? I wonder. — Eric Weiner

A quick quiz. What do the following events have in common? The war in Iraq. The Exxon Valdez oil spill. The rise in America's prison population. The answer: They all contribute to our nation's gross national product, or what's now referred to as gross domestic product, or GDP, and therefore all are considered "good," at least in the dismal eyes of economists. — Eric Weiner

The expectation of a reward or evaluation, even a positive evaluation, squelched creativity. — Eric Weiner

The creative act always requires a stepping back. It's called the incubation period. The incubation period - one of the four phases of creativity - is when you're not consciously thinking of a problem, and you're letting it marinate. So this is why you hear time and again, people saying they had that "Eureka" moment in the bath, like Archimedes, or in the shower, or while going for a walk or in a coffeehouse. — Eric Weiner

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

he believes it is, overall, a wiser approach to life's problems. After all, how can you pick up something new - a new career, a new relationship, a new outlook on life - without first letting go of the old? It's like trying to pick up a bag of groceries when your hands are already full. — Eric Weiner

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

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

In the nineteenth century, one hundred years before a country called Qatar existed, Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, wrote of "anomic suicide." It's what happens when a society's moral underpinnings are shaken. And they can be shaken, Durkheim believed, both by great disaster and by great fortune. — Eric Weiner

The British scholar Avner Offer calls attention "the universal currency of well-being." Attentive people, in other words, are happy people. Tashi — Eric Weiner

I would love to think there is a direct relationship between coffee and genius, but they've done studies, and if anything, caffeine probably makes you a little less creative. — Eric Weiner

In the late 1960s, a young Martin Seligman, now the pooh-bah of the positive-psychology movement, conducted experiments with dogs. He would place a dog in a cage and give it a (supposedly harmless) electric shock. The dog, though, could escape to another side of the cage and avoid the shock, the onset of which was signaled by a loud noise and a flashing light. Then Seligman put the dog in a no-win situation. No matter what he did, he couldn't avoid getting shocked. Then, and this is the part that surprised Seligman, when he returned the same dog to a cage where he could easily avoid the shock (by jumping over a low fence), the dog did nothing. He just sat there and endured the shocks. He had been taught to believe that the situation was hopeless. — Eric Weiner

The narrator, in a voice-of-God tenor, explains the experiment. — Eric Weiner

Why do we lose our temper? Because we love perfection. Create a little room for imperfection in your life. — Eric Weiner

See what is before you, the thing itself. Analyze later. — Eric Weiner

Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue. — Eric Weiner

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

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

Money sometimes buys happiness. You have to break it down, though. Money is a means to an end. The problem is when you think it is an end in itself. Happiness is relationships, and people in the west think money is needed for relationships. But it's not. It comes down to trustworthiness." I'd heard the same thing in Switzerland. Trust is a prerequisite for happiness. Trust not only of your government, of institutions, but trust of your neighbors. — Eric Weiner

I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner. — Eric Weiner

Later, someone explained that in Moldova the relationship between host and guest is reversed. It is the guest's obligation to make the host feel at ease. Reverse hospitality. One of the many peculiar customs in this country. — Eric Weiner

mandating innovation is an oxymoron, maybe not as absurd as "scheduling spontaneity," but perilously close. I — Eric Weiner

Not my problem" is not a philosophy. It's a mental illness. Right up there with pessimism. Other people's problems are our problems. If your neighbor is laid off, you may feel as if you've dodged the bullet, but you haven't. The bullet hit you as well. You just don't feel the pain yet. Or as Ruut Veenhoven told me: "The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society." In other words, better to be a small fish in a clean pond than a big fish in a polluted lake. Lesson — Eric Weiner

I visit the Swiss parliament building, a building that manages to be grand and ornate yet at the same time understated. Every nation has its iconic figures, statues that neatly sum up what the nation is all about: the Marines hoisting the flag at Iwo Jima; Lord Nelson, looking regal, in London's Trafalgar Square. The Swiss have someone known as Nicholas the Reconciler. His statue is on display here. He has an arm outstretched, palm facing downward, as if to say, "Calm down, everyone; let's talk about this rationally." It's very Swiss. — Eric Weiner

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

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

Where we are is vital to who we are, — Eric Weiner

Paradise is a moving target. — Eric Weiner

In a nutshell, Gross National Happiness seeks to measure a nation's progress not by its balance sheet but rather by the happiness - or unhappiness - of its people. It's a concept that represents a profound shift from how we think about money and satisfaction and the obligation of a government to its people. — Eric Weiner

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

Perhaps it's true you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scene of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fateful decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. — Eric Weiner

(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

McDonald's caved to the Indian palate and, for the first time, dropped Big Macs and all hamburgers from its menu, since Hindus don't eat beef. Instead, it serves McAloo Tikki and the McVeggie and a culinary hybrid, the Paneer Salsa Wrap. McDonald's didn't change India, as some feared. India changed McDonald's. And — Eric Weiner

Part of positive psychology is about being positive, but sometimes laughter and clowns are not appropriate. Some people don't want to be happy, and that's okay. They want meaningful lives, and those are not always the same as happy lives. — Eric Weiner

We are more willing to offend someone with whom we have weak ties, and a willingness to offend is an important part of creativity. Strong ties make us feel good, make us feel that we belong, but they also constrict our worldview. — Eric Weiner

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

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

The problem with finding paradise is that others might find it, too. — Eric Weiner

Nevertheless, a few brave researchers have bellied up to the laboratory. — Eric Weiner

It is pure id. Freud would not approve. He regarded the obvious with the same contempt most of us reserve for wine spritzers. — Eric Weiner

What was going on? Brickman surmised that, in the case of the lottery winners, they now derived significantly less pleasure from ordinary events like buying clothes or talking to a friend. What was once enjoyable was no longer so. Psychologists call this the "hedonic treadmill." Much like a regular treadmill, the hedonic treadmill makes you sweat and should be avoided at all costs. Unlike a regular treadmill, however, the hedonic variety is definitely not good for your health. It will drive you nuts, this infinite cycle of pleasure and adaptation. Interestingly, there are two notable exceptions to the hedonic treadmill. Noise and big breasts. Studies have found that we never really get used to loud noises, despite prolonged exposure. Another study found that women who get breast implants never tire of the enjoyment it brings them, and presumably their companions feel the same. — Eric Weiner

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

Envy, that enemy of happiness, is rife in Moldova. It's an especially virulent strain, one devoid of the driving ambition that usually accompanies envy. So the Moldovans get all of the downsides of envy without any of its benefits - namely, the thriving businesses and towering buildings erected by ambitious men and women out to prove they are better than everyone else. Moldovans derive more pleasure from their neighbor's failure than their own success. I can't imagine anything less happy. — Eric Weiner

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

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

am late for my afternoon coffee with Linda Leaming, an American who has lived in Bhutan for the past nine years. Asia has attracted its share of spiritual seekers, or lama lickers as they're sometimes called, but Bhutan was closed to outsiders until the 1970s. Even after that, it was not an easy country to get to. You had to want it. — Eric Weiner

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

For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that- try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn't the right country for you- just won't leave you in peace. — Eric Weiner

You can be as good as Rembrandt, but if no one discovers you, you will only be a genius in theory. — Eric Weiner

... but every activity we pursue comes with an opportunity cost, as the economists remind us. Time spent commuting to work is time not spent with your kids. Time spent debating the relative merits of kale versus arugula is time not spent discussing the nature of beauty and truth. I look down at my plate of bland grub with newfound respect. — Eric Weiner

Genius is not only a what or a who, it is a where. It is grounded in a place every single time. — Eric Weiner

GDP is simply the sum of all goods and services a nation produces over a given time. The sale of an assault rifle and the sale of an antibiotic both contribute equally to the national tally (assuming the sales price is the same). It's as if we tracked our caloric intake but cared not one whit what kind of calories we consumed. Whole grains or lard - or rat poison, for that matter. Calories are calories. GDP — Eric Weiner

Lesson number one: "Not my problem" is not a philosophy. It's a mental illness. Right up there with pessimism. Other people's problems are our problems. If your neighbor is laid off, you may feel as if you've dodged the bullet, but you haven't. The bullet hit you as well. You just don't feel the pain yet. Or as Ruut Veenhoven told me: "The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society." In other words, better to be a small fish in a clean pond than a big fish in a polluted lake. — Eric Weiner

The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth," observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan — Eric Weiner

Ancestry is not destiny, — Eric Weiner

Neuroscientists, meanwhile, believe they have located the part of the brain linked with altruism. To their surprise, it turns out to be a more primitive part of the brain than initially suspected - the same part associated with our cravings for food and sex. That suggests that we are hardwired for altruism and not just faking it. "Nothing — Eric Weiner

What doesn't kill you not only makes you stronger but also more honest. Laurey — Eric Weiner

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

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

Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it's demanding music of him. — Eric Weiner

Then, madam, they do nothing." Albert Einstein once said, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." Economics is long overdue for the kind of radical shift in thinking that Einstein brought to his field of physics. Does Gross National Happiness represent such a breakthrough? — Eric Weiner

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

Einstein's secretary once said that if Einstein were born among the polar bears, he would still be Einstein. But unless polar bears were well versed in theoretical physics, that is not true. Einstein would not be Einstein. Which is not to take anything away from Einstein, or the polar bears, but simply to point out that he was part of a creative ecology, and trying to isolate him from it is not only silly but futile. — Eric Weiner

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

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

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

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

Happiness doesn't require words. — Eric Weiner

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

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

Happiness is a choice. Not an easy choice, not always a desirable one, but a choice nonetheless. — Eric Weiner

[Happiness is] a ghost, it's a shadow. You can't really chase it. It's a by-product, a very pleasant side effect to a life lived well. — Eric Weiner

Kunley belongs to a spiritual school of thought known as crazy wisdom. Every religion has its branch of crazy wisdom. The Christians have their Fools for Christ. The Muslims have their Sufi Mast-Qalanders. The Jews have Woody Allen. Yet none is as crazy, or as wise, as Drukpa Kunley. — Eric Weiner

Divergent thinking is when we come up with multiple, unexpected solutions to problems. Divergent thinking is spontaneous and free-flowing. Convergent thinking, by contrast, is more linear and entails a narrowing, rather than an expanding, of your options. Convergent thinkers are trying to find the one correct answer to a question. Divergent thinkers reframe the question. The — Eric Weiner

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

We in the west think of unpredictability as a menace, something to be avoided at all costs. We want our careers, our family lives, our roads, our weather to be utterly predictable. We love nothing more than a sure thing. Shuffling the songs on our iPod is about as much randomness as we can handle. But here is a group of rational software engineers telling me that they like unpredictability, crave it, can't live without it. I get an inkling, not for the first time, that India lies at a spiritual latitude beyond the reach of the science of happiness. At — Eric Weiner

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

Social scientists estimate that about 70 percent of our happiness stems from our relationships, both quantity and quality, with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. During life's difficult patches, camaraderie blunts our misery; during the good times, it boosts our happiness. — Eric Weiner

Everyone has their own idea of happiness. — Eric Weiner

We are shaped not only by our current geography but by our ancestral one as well. Americans, for instance, retain a frontier spirit even though the only frontier that remains is that vast open space between the SUV and strip mall. We are our past. — Eric Weiner

few weeks later, back in Miami, I spot a small news item. Thailand's newly installed prime minister, Surayud Chulanont, the civilian face of the junta, has announced that henceforth, official government policy will no longer focus on economic growth but, rather, the happiness of the people. It is largely a public-relations ploy - but, still, a military government with a happiness policy! As the sublime absurdity of this news sinks in, I react in the only sensible way: I smile. A broad, authentic Thai smile. Really. If you were there, you'd know. You would have seen it in my eyes. — Eric Weiner

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

That pretty much describes the life of a foreign man living in Bangkok. Except instead of pressing a lever, he's digging into his wallet for a few more baht. The same principle is at work, though. The same mindless obedience to their pleasure centers. Yet if pleasure were the path to happiness then the farang, the foreigner, in Thailand would achieve bliss, and so would the Canadian rats. Yet neither has. Happiness is more than animal pleasure. — Eric Weiner