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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

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Eric Weiner
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
the United States of America
Write
Enough
Writing
Island
Good
Islands
Ahead
Sing
Paint
Telling

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Believing in everything looks a lot like believing in nothing.
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A confused mind is one that is open to the possibility of change.
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When you're stuck on something creatively, you can't solve a problem, you go to a coffee shop.
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I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.
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Genius is not only a what or a who, it is a where. It is grounded in a place every single time.
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I'm interested in genius the way a hungry man is interested in Philadelphia cheesesteaks. I want something. I want a piece of it.
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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.
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Reason cannot account for those moments in life that bewilder the intellect yet utterly quiet the heart, as G.K. Chesterton observed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When you drink coffee, you become very focused, and in fact, the key to creative genius is to be defocused.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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what doesn't kill you not only make you stronger, but also more honest.
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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.
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