Eric Weiner famous quotes

what doesn't kill you not only make you stronger, but also more honest.
-- Eric Weiner

#Stronger #Honest #Makes You Stronger

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

#Decision #Return #Crime

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

#Beach #Gratitude #Thinking

[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

#Shadow #Sides #Ghost

a simple question to identify your true home: where do you want to die?
-- Eric Weiner

#Home #Simple #Want

A confused mind is one that is open to the possibility of change.
-- Eric Weiner

#Confused #Mind #Possibility

Happiness is not a noun or a verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.
-- Eric Weiner

#Verbs #Tissues #Nouns

Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.
-- Eric Weiner

#Skills #Use #Compromise

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

#Who We Are

We can't love a place or a person if we always have one foot out the door.
-- Eric Weiner

#Doors #Feet #Persons

Reason cannot account for those moments in life that "bewilder the intellect yet utterly quiet the heart," as G.K. Chesterton observed.
-- Eric Weiner

#Heart #Quiet #Moments

Joseph Campbell, who when asked what spiritual practice he followed said, "I underline books." Me too.
-- Eric Weiner

#Spiritual #Book #Practice

It's not what we believe that makes us happy but the act of believing. In anything.
-- Eric Weiner

#Believe

It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts. This explains the popularity of two enterprises: ***** and cafés.
-- Eric Weiner

#Two #Facts #Human Nature

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

#Mean #Men #Thinking

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

#Religious #Thinking #People

Believing in everything looks a lot like believing in nothing.
-- Eric Weiner

#Believe #Looks

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

#People #Office #Family And Friends

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

#Heart #Holiday #Destiny

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.
-- Eric Weiner

#Wall #Philosophy #Thinking

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

#Real #Biblical #Garden

So 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.
-- Eric Weiner

#Wall #Moving #College

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

#Writing #Islands #Not Good Enough

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

#Past #Space #Suvs

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

#Helping Others #People #Feel Good

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

#Country #Party #Simple

As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energied and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of ***** of negativity.'... The Brits don't merely enjoy misery, they get off on it.
-- Eric Weiner

#Negativity #Misery #Kind

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

#Thinking #Goal #Mind

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

#Meaningful #Laughter #Happy Life

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

#Country #Unrequited Love #Thinking

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

#Country #Jobs #Moving

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

#Past #Who We Are #Way

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

#Tricks

..there is more to life than just pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it.
-- Eric Weiner

#Want #Pleasure #Achieve

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

#Sight #People #Grace

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

#Frustration #Waiting #Mystery