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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.

Eric Weiner

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Eric Weiner
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
the United States of America
Intellect
Accounts
Quiet
Moments
Bewilder
Cannot
Chesterton
Reason
Observed
Heart
Utterly
Life
Account

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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.
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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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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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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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Believing in everything looks a lot like believing in nothing.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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..there is more to life than just pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it.
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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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A confused mind is one that is open to the possibility of change.
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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.
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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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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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Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.
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It's not what we believe that makes us happy but the act of believing. In anything.
Eric Weiner