Eric Weiner > Quotes

“No wonder so many philosophers walked. Socrates, of course, liked nothing more than strolling in the agora. Nietzsche regularly embarked on spirited two-hour jaunts in the Swiss Alps, convinced “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Thomas Hobbes had a walking stick custom made with a portable inkwell attached so he could record his thoughts as he ambled. Thoreau regularly took four-hour treks across the Concord countryside, his capacious pockets overflowing with nuts, seeds, flowers, Indian arrowheads, and other treasures. Immanuel Kant, naturally, maintained a highly regimented walking routine. Every day, he’d eat lunch at 12:45 p.m., then depart for a one-hour constitutional — never more, never less — on the same boulevard in Königsberg, Prussia (now Russia). So unwavering was Kant’s routine that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his perambulations.”
― Eric Weiner, The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

“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.”
― Eric Weiner

“Great people - and I do believe Franklin was a great person - teach us by both positive example and negative. Object lessons are still lessons. Sometimes they are the most valuable of all.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Happiness contemplated is happiness lost”
― Eric Weiner, The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

“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’.”
― Eric Weiner

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

“But if I’ve learned anything thus far, it’s that life lessons are sometimes written in invisible ink. They become legible only when exposed to the light.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“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.”
― Eric Weiner

“Eğer mutlu değilseniz bunu dert etmekten vazgeçin ve kendi mutsuzluğunuzdan ne gibi hazineler çıkartabileceğinizi görün.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“If it takes a village to raise a child, as the African proverb goes, it takes a city to raise a genius.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley

“Travel is essential the way books and hugs are essential. Food for the soul.”
― Eric Weiner

“Extroverts are happier than introverts; optimists are happier than pessimists; married people are happier than singles; though people with children are no happier than childless couples; Republicans are happier than Democrats; people who attend religious services are happier than those who do not; people with college degrees are happier than those without, though people with advanced degrees are less happy than those with just a BA; people with an active sex life are happier than those without; women and men are equally happy, though women have a wider emotional range; having an affair will make you happy but will not compensate for the massive loss of happiness that you will incur when your spouse finds out and leaves you; people are least happy when they're commuting to work; busy people are happier than those with too little to do; wealthy people are happier than poor ones, but only slightly.”
― Eric Weiner

“Nowhere does [Benjamin Franklin] disappoint more, though, than when it comes to slavery.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“The media, of which I am a culpable member, report, as a rule, only bad news: wars, famine, the latest Hollywood couple's implosion. I don't mean to belittle the troubles in the world, and God knows I have made a good living reporting them, but we journalists do paint a distorted picture.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“Some journeys change us on a molecular level, We depart one person and arrive another. I’d like to say it is magical, but that is not right. Something else is going on. The act of travel, of movement, doesn’t change us so much as solidify us. On the road, free from expectations, others and our own, pieces of ourselves, previously scattered fragments, click into place, and we are whole. This is what happened to Charles Darwin in the Galapagos, Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, George Harrison on the banks of the Ganges. They all experienced what author Robert Grunion calls “the beauty of sudden seeing’.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“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.”
― Eric Weiner

“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.”
― Eric Weiner

“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, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley

“Mutluluk büyük olaylardan ziyade gündelik küçük şanslar neticesinde elde edilir.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“It frightens me. Death frightens me too, but old age frightens me more. Death - dying, to be more precise - is a finite experience. Nature ensures that it won’t take long (even if it feels interminable). Old age is another story. It can last a long time and, unlike dying, the rules are less clear. The dying are supposed to die. The old are supposed to … what? Get older? Pretend they are young? I don’t know what the correct answer is. I’m not sure anybody does.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“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.”
― Eric Weiner

“[Franklin] needed a miracle. He knew it would not come from heaven or himself. For Franklin, miracles always arrived in the form of other people.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“I reach the sad conclusion that at my age (older but not old), I will never learn to speak French, not even poorly. I will never climb Mt Everest or star in a Broadway play or en an off-off-Broadway one. I will never spelunk. A stanza from a poem by Donald Justice comes to mind: Men at forty/Learn to close softly/the doors to rooms they will not be/Coming back to. I am well past forty, and the doors are slamming shut so rapidly I am beginning to feel trapped.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Kant şöyle der: "Mutluluk, nedenselliğe değil hayal gücüne dair bir fikirdir." Diğer bir değişle, mutluluğu biz yaratırız ve bir şey yaratmanın ilk adımı onu hayal etmektir.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“Chronometric age tells us nothing about a person. It tells us nothing about Ben Franklin who, at nearly seventy, was just getting started.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

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

“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.”
― Eric Weiner

“Franklin was an odd fish but not a cold one.”
― Eric Weiner, Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life

“Old age is a large immovable object and closer than it appears. Encounters with it are never gentle. You do not brush up against old age. You do not sideswipe old age. You collide with it head on.”
― Eric Weiner

“The self-help industrial complex hasn’t helped. By telling us that happiness lives inside us, it’s turned us inward just when we should be looking outward. Not to money but to other people, to community and to the kind of human bonds that so clearly are the sources of our happiness.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World