Best 88 quotes of Eric Weiner on MyQuotes

...any overlap between TV and reality is purely coincidental.

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.

First of all, nothing good ever came from a beanbag chair. Nothing. I am speaking from personal experience.

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

He loves the way hot water spouts from the ground like geothermal gold. He loves the way people invite you over for coffee for no particular reason and talk for hours about nothing in particular. He loves the way Icelanders call their country, affectionately, the ice cube. He loves the fact that, without even trying, he already knows three members of Parliament. He loves the way on a brisk winter day the snow crunches under his feet like heavenly Styrofoam. He loves the choirs that line the main shopping street in December, their voices strong and radiant, turning back the night. He loves the fact that five-year-olds can safely walk to school alone in the predawn darkness. He loves the magical, otherworldly feeling of swimming laps in the middle of a snowstorm. He loves the way, when your car gets stuck in the snow, someone always, always stops to help. He loves the way Icelanders applaud when the plane lands at the international airport in Keflavík just because they’re happy to be home. He loves the way the Icelanders manage to be tremendously proud people yet not the least bit arrogant. And, yes, he loves- not tolerates but actively loves- the darkness. Most of all, Jared loves living in a culture that doesn’t put people in boxes- or at least allows them to move freely from one box to another.

Ideas are like bananas. That bananas grow only in tropical regions doesn't make them any less delicious in Scandinavia.

I have stress. Of course I have stress. But there are some situations we can’t control. You can’t change things outside yourself, so you change your attitude. I think that approach works for the Thai people. Like when you’re pissed at someone, and you can’t do anything about it. You feel you want to hit them, but you can’t, so you take a deep breath and let it go. Otherwise, it will ruin your day.

In America, few people are happy, but everyone talks about happiness constantly. In Bhutan, most people are happy, but no one talks about it. This is a land devoid of introspection, bereft of self-help books, and woefully lacking in existential angst. There is no Bhutanese Dr. Phil. There is, in fact, only one psychiatrist in the entire country. He is not named Phil and, I am sad to report, does not even have his own television show.

In Britain, the happy are few and suspect….For the British, happiness is a transatlantic import. And by “transatlantic” they mean American. ....For the English, life is about not happiness but muddling through, getting by.

Indeed, it took me weeks of digging and asking and thinking before I figured out what he was talking about. Icelanders, not an especially religious people, occupy the space that exists between not believing and not not believing. It is valuable real estate. A place where the door to the unexplained is always left slightly ajar. Just in case.

In front of each shop, each home, is a spirit house. These look like elaborate, beautiful birdhouses. The idea is that by giving evil spirits a place to inhabit, a room of their own, they will stay away from your actual home. It’s not unlike the in-law cottages that sit in the yards of many Miami homes. Same principle.

In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.

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: pornography and cafés. Americans excel at the former, but Europeans do a better job at the latter. The food and the coffee are almost beside the point. I once heard of a café in Tel Aviv that dispensed with food and drink all together; it served customers empty plates and cups yet charged real money. Cafés are theaters where the customer is both audience and performer.

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

It reminds me about Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, said when asked what the main aim of his life had been: ‘to be a good ancestor.’ A comment like that can only come from a man profoundly aware of his place in the universe.

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.

It was a great opportunity to get oral transmission; you can read and read the text to get some ideas, but you can be misled by written words. It is best if done orally.

messiness stimulates creative thought.

Nothing kills creativity faster than a wall.

nothing kills genius more than a sure thing.

Not surprisingly, places with high crime rates rank low on the happiness scale...The reasons are less obvious than you might think. Someone who has been robbed or assaulted, of course, is not likely to be happy, but crime victims still make up a tiny part of the population (in most countries at least). It's not the crime per se that makes a place 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 a crime.

Para peneliti menemukan bahwa orang, sekurang-kurangnya orang waras, jarang tersenyum ketika sendirian. Senyuman merupakan sebuah isyarat sosial lebih dari sekadar refleksi batin kita, sekalipun bisa juga berarti demikian.

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.

Recording life is a poor substitute for living it.

Saya bertanya bagaimana Rinpoche tau bahwa semua ini benar, karena tidak ada bukti atas hal-hal ini. "Anda melihat cahaya itu?" dia bertanya, menunjuk lampu diatas. "Ya, saya melihatnya." "Tetapi Anda tidak dapat membuktikannya. Jika Anda buta sejak lahir, Anda tidak dapat melihatnya. Jika Anda ingin bukti, Anda tidak akan pernah mendapatkan pencerahan.

Thais accept what has happened, which is not to say they like what happened or want it to happen again. Of course not. But they take the long view: eternity. If things don’t work out in this life, there is always the next one, and the next one, and so on. Periods of good fortune naturally alternate with periods of adversity, just as sunny days are interspersed with rainy ones. It’s the way things are. In a worldview like this, blame doesn’t feature prominently, but fortune – destiny- does, and I was curious about mine.

That’s hard to say, but there is no denying, for Icelanders at least, language is an immense source of joy. Everything wise and wonderful about this quirky little nation flows from its language. The formal Icelandic reading is ‘komdu saell,’ which translates literally as ‘come happy’. When Icelanders part, they say ‘vertu saell,’ ‘go happy’. I like that one a lot. It’s much better than ‘take care’ or ‘catch you later’.

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.

The point is, the "best" technology or idea doesn't always prevail. Sometimes chance and the law of unintended consequences win out.

The thing about paradise, though, is we don't always recognize it immediately. Its paradiseness takes time to sink in.

Today my mother may be human. But when I die I may be reborn as a dog and then my mother may be a bitch. So, therefore, you have to think that all living things are my parents. My parents are infinite. Let my parents not suffer.

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?

Trusting your neighbors is especially important. Simply knowing them can make a real different in your quality of life. One study found that, of all the factors that affect the crime rate for a given area, the one that made the biggest difference was not the number of police patrols, or anything like that but, rather, how many people you know within a 15-minute walk of your house.

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.

Words fail me. We have far more words to describe unpleasant emotional states than pleasant ones. (And this is the case with all languages, not just English.) If we're not happy, we have a smorgasbord of words to choose from. We can say we're feeling down, blue, miserable, sullen, gloomy, dejected, morose, despondent, in the dumps, out of sorts, long in the face. But if we're happy that smorgasbord is reduced to the salad bar at Pizza Hut. We might say we're elated or content or blissful. These words, though, don't capture the shades of happiness. We need a new word to describe Swiss happiness. Something more than mere contnetmnet but less than full-on joy. 'Conjoyment,' perhaps. Yes, that's what the Swiss possess: utter conjoyment. We could use this word to describe all kinds of situations where we feel joy yet calm at the same time.

Yes, but you Americans take your fun very seriously. We Thais do not. We don’t believe in this work-hard, play-hard mentality. Our fun is interspersed throughout the day. What do you mean? It could be a smile or laugh during the workday. It’s not as uptight as in America. Also, our patterns of holidays are different. We don’t take the entire month of August off, like Europeans. We take a day off here, a week off there. Everything is interspersed.

Yes, failure is part of the mix, he says, but it is a means, not an end. If you fail repeatedly, and in the same manner, you're an idiot, not a genius.

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