Eric Weiner quotes:

You look around the world at geniuses, and they don't appear randomly, they appear in genius clusters. Athens in 50 BC, Florence 1500, Silicon Valley today. This is not a coincidence.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

People don't go to Starbucks for the coffee - of that I'm pretty sure - they go for the atmosphere, they go for the 70 decibels, they go for the Starbucks effect.

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.

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

I'm interested in genius the way a hungry man is interested in Philadelphia cheesesteaks. I want something. I want a piece of it.

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.

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.

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

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

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

[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.

I've always been a big believer in the power of place. I believe that where we are affects who we are when it comes to happiness, spirituality, economics and creative genius.

Genius is not only a what or a who, it is a where. It is grounded in a place every single time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The creative act always requires a stepping back. It's called the incubation period. The incubation period - one of the four phases of creativity - is when you're not consciously thinking of a problem, and you're letting it marinate. So this is why you hear time and again, people saying they had that "Eureka" moment in the bath, like Archimedes, or in the shower, or while going for a walk or in a coffeehouse.

Believing in everything looks a lot like believing in nothing.

Where we are is vital to who we are,

Music was literally in the air at the time, the Vienna of 1780. Everybody played music, classical music. There were in fact so many musicians that in apartment buildings people had to come up with a schedule - you practice at 5 p.m., I'll practice at 6 p.m. That way the music didn't collide with one another.

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

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.

Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it's demanding music of him.

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.

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.

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

A Mozart symphony is very much like a Pixar movie - in the sense that Pixar movies are hugely successful because they operate on several levels at the same time.

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.

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

Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, none of them were born in Vienna. They all moved there. It became a magnet, but what made it magnetized in the first place? There has to be a seed there. In the case of Vienna of about 1780, it was this deep-seated love of music.

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.

You need some reason why Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn in the 18th century all flocked to Vienna. What was it about Vienna? They must have known on some level that that is where they would flourish. It's what biologists call "selective migration."

When you're stuck on something creatively, you can't solve a problem, you go to a coffee shop.

What is the ideal audio atmosphere for creativity and it turns out it is not complete silence, and it is not a very loud atmosphere, it's something about 70 decibels.

I think we should have more coffeehouses, more cafes, more "third places." More places where people can get together that's not work, not home, and where they can interact with people who are different from them.

If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time.

The coffeehouse is good for genius, and the Viennese coffeehouse is a classic case. Freud had his favorite coffee shop, and so did Gustav Klimt.

Psychologists call it "defocused attention," where you broaden your horizons, let your mind float and drift a bit. Coffee keeps us sharp and alert. It's great if you're driving at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's not so great if you're trying to come up with the next violin concerto.

When you drink coffee, you become very focused, and in fact, the key to creative genius is to be defocused.

I would love to think there is a direct relationship between coffee and genius, but they've done studies, and if anything, caffeine probably makes you a little less creative.

The coffee shop played a big role in Vienna of 1900. Rents were sky high, housing was difficult to come by, your apartment probably wasn't heated, and so you went to the coffee shop. You went to the coffee shop because it was warm, because it was great Viennese coffee, and you went for the conversation and the company.

Don't forget that Mozart worked on commission. He almost always would write something if he knew exactly who was paying for it and where it would be performed. So you can't really separate the creation of genius from the appreciation of it.