Quotes & Sayings About Paradise Places

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

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

How, I wonder, staring out my hotel window into black nothingness, can Icelanders possibly be happy living under this veil of darkness? I've always associated happy places with palm trees and beaches and blue drinks and, of course, swim-up bars. That's paradise, right? The global travel industry certainly wants us to think so. Bliss, the ads tell us, lies someplace else, and that someplace else is sunny and eighty degrees. Always. Our language, too, reflects the palm-tree bias. Happy people have a sunny disposition and always look on the bright side of life. Unhappy people possess dark souls and black bile. — Eric Weiner

You're mistaken, Father. You were in paradise, but you didn't recognize it. It's the same with most people in this world; they seek suffering in the most joyous of places because they think they are unworthy of happiness. — Paulo Coelho

The best sex takes us somewhere. Somewhere warm and expansive, a paradise of lust and happiness. Sex is and can be and should be but only very rarely is an act of communion with something bigger than ourselves. Men fuck and women make love, people say, but we men make love when we fuck a woman we adore: it's the same thing to us. We mean it sincerely. I had places inside me only Cathy could fill with her body, and I made her happy with my body more than I ever thought I could. — Deborah Smith

The word "utopia" has two meanings. It means both "good place" and "nowhere". That's the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn't want to live in the perfect place, either. "A life time of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on earth," wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. — Eric Weiner

line. Creativity is a response to our environment. Greek painting was a response to the complex light (the Greek painter Apollodoros was the first to develop a technique for creating the illusion of depth), Greek architecture a response to the complex landscape, Greek philosophy a response to the complex, uncertain times. The problem with paradise is that it is perfect and therefore requires no response. This is why wealthy people and places often stagnate. Athens — Eric Weiner

Alone with myself and my talent, I chose it in some way I never had before. I chose myself also. The person I was and had been all along, the one who had not belonged to the place where she was born, nor to the places she found along the way, the one always under the mask, here she came out and breathed the air and felt at home. I had always believed that to be this person might destroy me or the world, and so as the world seemed to end, this made the end of the world seem nearly a paradise. — Alexander Chee

Paradise was always over there, a day's sail away. But it's a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home. — J. Maarten Troost

Valhalla on the right. Paradise regained on the left. Stuck between a Godiva truffle and a chocolate eclair. Between a rock and a very hard place. Two very hard places from the looks of it. — Karen Marie Moning

The number of places in paradise is limited; only in hell is entry open to all. — Dmitry Glukhovsky

First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence
lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage. — Thomas Merton

One of the most magical places on Earth is a small island in the Caribbean called Mustique. With brilliant beaches, warm water, and lush vegetation, this tiny green swath of land is my idea of paradise. — Nina Garcia

Walk with care in dark places, and do not put your faith in anyone who promises you the forgiveness of the Lord or a certain place in Paradise. — Clive Barker

Homo religiosus invents religious symbols, which he venerates and worships to save him from facing the finality of his death and dissolution. He devises paradise fictions to provide succor and support ... In acts of supreme self-deception, at various times and in various places he has been willing to profess belief in the most incredible myths because of what they have promised him. — Paul Kurtz

You deal with mythological stuff for a few years, you learn that paradises are usually places where you get killed. — Rick Riordan

If you had the chance to visit paradise or heaven, would you? Are you thinking you'll get another chance later? What if you reach the Pearly Gates, and Saint Peter says, 'Hey, you had plenty of opportunities to spend time in heavenly places down there. Sorry. — Ron Lizzi

The Travel Channel had success with their 'Food Paradise' series, '10 Best Places to Pig Out' and those types of specials, so they knew there was a market for comfort food and wanted to develop a show around it. — Adam Richman

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

There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that's saying a heap. — Toni Morrison

The rare beauty of distant places made home seem as if we had been thrown out of paradise and sent to purgatory or worse. — Scott Haas

For cities are museums of time, and to live in them is to be haunted by the places they once were. The waterways that existed before the skyscrapers and freeways are a vanished world that beacons to us. When we catch glimpses of them, the city disappears. Its too-known streets dissolve into unfathomable terrain. It becomes innocent again. We want to unmake the city. To regain a lost paradise. — Gary Kamiya

Of all the places I've ever lived, Paradise has been my favorite. It's where I made my first best friend. It's where I developed my first Legacy. It's where I fell in love. But Paradise was also where I met my first Mogadorians. Where I had my first real battle and felt real pain. It's the place where Henri died. Bernie — Pittacus Lore