Eric Weiner Quotes Page 2


 
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Best 80 Quotes by Eric Weiner – Page 2 of 3

The Geography of Bliss Quotes

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“Religion is like a knife. If you use it the wrong way you can cut yourself.”

The Geography of Bliss

“Some cultures, for instance, are collectivist; others are individualistic. Collectivist cultures, like Japan and other Confucian nations, value social harmony more than any one person’s happiness. Individualistic cultures, like the United States, value personal satisfaction more than communal harmony. That’s why the Japanese have a well-known expression: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In America, the nail that sticks out gets a promotion or a shot at American Idol. We are a nation of protruding nails.”

The Geography of Bliss

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“The greatest source of happiness is other people--and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house, and if we're really wealthy, to an estate. We think we're moving up, but really we're walling off ourselves.”

The Geography of Bliss

“The Inuit frown upon thinking. It indicates someone is either crazy or fiercely stubborn, neither of which is desirable.”

The Geography of Bliss

“The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together–you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is 'out there'."
In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.”

The Geography of Bliss

“The measure of a society, he said, is how well it transforms pain and suffering into something worthwhile.”

The Geography of Bliss

“The problem with finding paradise is that others might find it, too.”

The Geography of Bliss

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“There is more to life than just pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it.”

The Geography of Bliss

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“Thinking about happiness makes us less happy.”

The Geography of Bliss

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“Souls create their own heaven or hell by the way they manage their thoughts.”


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“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“We feel so disoriented, irritated even, when the 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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

“What doesn't kill you not only make you stronger, but also more honest.”

The Geography of Bliss

“What is religion if not a guide to happiness, to bliss? Every religion instructs followers in the ways of happiness, be it in this life or the next, be it through submission, meditation, devotion, or, if you happen to belong to the Jewish or Catholic faith, guilt.”

The Geography of Bliss

“When the last tree is cut, When the last river is emptied, When the last fish is caught, Only then will Man realize that he can not eat money.”

The Geography of Bliss

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

The Geography of Bliss

“Without cold, there would be no coziness.”

The Geography of Bliss

“Worst of all was Freud. While not technically a brooding philosopher, Freud did much to shape our views on happiness. He once said: “The intention that Man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.” That is a remarkable statement, especially coming from a man whose ideas forged the foundation of our mental-health system. Imagine if some doctor in turn-of-the-century Vienna had declared: “The intention that Man should have a healthy body is not in the plan of Creation.” We’d probably lock him up, or at least strip him of his medical license. We certainly wouldn’t base our entire medical system on his ideas. Yet that is exactly what we did with Freud.”

The Geography of Bliss

“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.”

The Geography of Bliss

The Geography of Genius Quotes

“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.”

The Geography of Genius

“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.”

The Geography of Genius

“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.”

The Geography of Genius

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“Say 'please' and 'thank you'.”


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