“..there is more to life than just pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it.”
Work
Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, this book takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness." The book uses a mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Singapore benefit psychologically by having their options limited by the government? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina, so darn happy? NPR correspondent Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.--From publisher description.
Quotes
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Eric Weiner
Canonical work source
“..there is more to life than just pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it.”
“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 ver...”
“I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.”
“Maybe happiness is this: not feeling that you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.”
“[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.”