Home > Work > The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World
1 " [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. "
― Eric Weiner , The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World
2 " I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner. "
3 " ..there is more to life than just pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it. "
4 " Rule number one: wear loose clothing. No Problem. Rule number two: no alcohol for the next three days. Slight problem. I'll miss my evening glass of wine but figure I can go for three days without and compensate later.And the last rule: absolutely no coffee or tea or caffeine of any kind.Big problem. This rule hits me like a sucker punch and sure would have knocked me to the floor had I not been sitting there already. I'm eying the exits, plotting my escape. I knew enlightenment came at a price, but i had no idea the price was this steep. A sense of real panic sets in. How am I going to survive for the next seventy-two hours without a single cup of coffee? "
5 " 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. "
6 " Too often when we say we feel joyful, we’re really feeling manic. There is a frenetic nature to our joy, a whiff of panic; we’re afraid the moment might end abruptly. But then there are other moments when our joy is more solidly grounded. I am not speaking of a transcendental moment, of bliss, but something less. "
7 " a simple question to identify your true home: where do you want to die? "
8 " what doesn't kill you not only make you stronger, but also more honest. "
9 " 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. "
10 " The biophilia hypothesis is not your run-of-the-mill Berkeley/Al Gore/Eat Your Spinach environmentalism. It does not appeal directly to our sense of stewardship or responsibility. It appeals to a much more base, and common, human proclivity: selfishness. It says, in effect, protect the environment because it will make you happy. For a country like the United States, with the word “happiness” in its founding document, you’d think environmentalists would have latched on to biophilia a long time ago. "
11 " it is again: that Hindu belief that all of life is maya, illusion. Once we see life as a game, no more consequential than a game of chess, then the world seems a lot lighter, a lot happier. Personal failure becomes “as small a cause for concern as playing the role of loser in a summer theater performance,” writes Huston Smith in his book The World’s Religions. If it’s all theater, it doesn’t matter which role you play, as long as you realize it’s only a role. Or, as Alan Watts said: “A genuine person is one who knows he is a big act and does it with complete zip. "
12 " 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. "
13 " Moldovans, most of whom will never be able to afford the products advertised—unless they sell a kidney. Joseph Epstein, in his book on envy, described the entire advertising industry as “a vast and intricate envy-producing machine.” In Moldova, all of that envy has nowhere to dissipate; it just accumulates, like so much toxic waste. "
14 " 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. "
15 " 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. "
16 " Mungkin kebahagiaan adalah ini: tidak merasa Anda harus berada di suatu tempat lain, melakukan sesuatu yang lain, menjadi orang lain. "
17 " ...any overlap between TV and reality is purely coincidental. "
18 " 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. "
19 " 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. "
20 " 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. "