Pico Iyer Quotes

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

Hello Kitty will never speak.

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

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

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.

Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves.

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

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

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

We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

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

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?

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

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

Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

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

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

Adventure today means finding one's way back to the silence and stillness of a thousand years ago.

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

I think [Dalai Lama]is far and away the most solid, deep-thinking, far-sighted politician I've met, and I've been a journalist for 26 years for Time magazine, so I've met a lot of politicians.

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.

We can better see what we don't have. The other man's grass is always greener and now we can actually go and visit his grass much more and feel the absence of green in our own lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

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

My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.

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

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

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

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

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

That's the great advantage of being a foreigner: you're not paying your dues, but you are getting all the benefits.

Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways.

I think Dalai Lama efforts have been heroic.

Our own country seemed more polarized than it's ever been and since the two terrorist attacks of 9/11, religion was in greater disrepute than at any other time in my lifetime.

Dalai Lama has not coming to show us his kindness, so that we can enjoy his charisma, he's coming with a specific message for the specific circumstances of the world today.

More than any religious figure that I can think of, Dalai Lama goes out of his way to attend interfaith conferences; religious harmony is one of his urgent priorities in life.

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

For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.