Pico Iyer quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Pico Iyer on Wise Famous Quotes.

To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish.

A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

You rebel against your parents until you become them. One day you look in the mirror and you see your father's face.

Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.

I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim. He

All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can't be sure of a thing.

The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.

Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer.

A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.

To step away from the world isn't to draw back; it's actually a way to tune in.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

For citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands.

... you could help people most by not giving them the burden of your heart.

For centuries, Cuba's greatest resource has been its people.

The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.

It so often happens that somebody says 'change your life' and you repaint your car rather than re-wire the engine.

Hello Kitty will never speak.

I think Dalai Lama is always careful about stressing that people be led into the practice by somebody who knows what's going on.

Movement is a fantastic privilege ... but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to.

Any school would gain, if the students began the day with meditation, cleared their heads and got themselves centered.

I think Dalai Lama efforts have been heroic.

I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling. But there's something about it that you can't turn away from.

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

Sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it;

I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.

The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.

The more we run from a problem, the more we're actually running into it.

I think the world is always going to be as diverse as it always has been.

Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.

A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.

A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure.

Travel is an act of humility

We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.

Families are so important here," I said. She looked surprised. "They are not everywhere?

Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.

When love is a commodity, you wonder why anyone's giving it away for free. Or what the hidden costs might be.

The Dalai Lama says don't pray for peace, don't wait for peace, don't talk about peace - do it right now.

Many people would say that A Tibetan monk, even in Lhasa, may be free while the ruler of China may not be free.

I'd turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it's harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world.

Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.

For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.

Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours.

But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us.

The Dalai Lama says that when a Catholic and a Buddhist speak, the Buddhist becomes a deeper Buddhist and the Catholic becomes a deeper Catholic.

[The Dalai Lama ] says Western traditions can teach Tibetans a lot about social action, and he thinks some Christians are very good at that.

The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure.

So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

The Dalai Lama would say that meditation is something that can help everyone. But he's aware that it can be misused or things can go wrong.

Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?

But it's only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

Places have charisma, in short, as much as people do.

I suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.

Home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.

It's not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them;

Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them.

Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective.

I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would.

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?

A man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.

As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds.

All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.

Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep, but the place where you stand.

The beauty of any first time is that it leads to a thousand others ...

... epiphanies rarely repeat themselves.

There's one problem with California." I wasn't eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. "It has no understanding of evil.

In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.

I often think we're most happy when we forget the time,

Dalai Lama is taking a subtle and nuanced view of politics and he is thinking in terms of events well beyond our lifetime.

Though I knew that poverty certainly didn't buy happiness, I wasn't convinced that money did, either.

Reality seemed so paltry next to castles - dungeons - in the air.

She liked it? 'I love it
the way you'd love an orphan, or a bird with a broken foot.

You can see exile as loss, and then it will be a loss for you. You can treat it as opportunity and then all kinds of benefits accrue.

The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.

I think it's in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you.

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.