Pico Iyer famous quotes

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
-- Pico Iyer

#Travel #Falling In Love #Taken

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

#Age #Movement #Sitting

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

#Travel #Home #Leaving

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

#Travel #Next

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

#Lying #Home #Ties

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

#Falling In Love #Travel #Taken

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with.
-- Pico Iyer

#Country #Journey #Darkness

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

#Movement #Transformation #Committed

In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.
-- Pico Iyer

#Gossip #Too Late #Appetite

Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty.
-- Pico Iyer

#Two #Issues #Sight

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
-- Pico Iyer

#Inspirational #Best Love #Travel

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.
-- Pico Iyer

#Turning Your Back #And Love #World

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

#Perspective #Movement #Stillness

In an age of speed, I began to think nothing could be more exhilarating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
-- Pico Iyer

#Thinking #Age #Attention

Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger
-- Pico Iyer

#Writing #Parent #Anomalies

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?
-- Pico Iyer

#Choices #Mind #Stuff

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

#Way #Desperate

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

#Opposites #Sometimes

Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.
-- Pico Iyer

#Motivational #Book #Feel Better

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.
-- Pico Iyer

#Rain #Sleep #Autumn

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

#Important #Spirit #Destination

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.
-- Pico Iyer

#Lonely #Loneliness #People

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

#Different #Sanctuary #Findings

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

#Writing #Anomalies #Letters

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.
-- Pico Iyer

#Sweet #Rivers #Mind

What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady. To be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together, and they would not trust or want to listen to one another; but each is a piece of a stained-glass whole without which I couldn’t make sense to myself, or to the world outside.
-- Pico Iyer

#Book #Heart #Glasses

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

#Awake

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

#Running #Problem

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

#Car #Wire #Changing Your Life

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

#Liberation

Anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around - you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life.
-- Pico Iyer

#Wall #Moving #Order

For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.
-- Pico Iyer

#People #Cuba #Resources

For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, Wheres your home? I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.
-- Pico Iyer

#Song #Home #Thinking

In the past, Ive visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldnt ordinarily explore.
-- Pico Iyer

#Easter #Past #Korea

Its no coincidence that the word holiday suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.
-- Pico Iyer

#Book #Holiday #Wish

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.
-- Pico Iyer

#Moon #Water #Way

The ultimate purpose of Zen,' I remembered the roshi telling me, 'is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.
-- Pico Iyer

#Love #Compassion #Going Away

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

#Inspiring #World #Way

For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.
-- Pico Iyer

#Home #Light #Luxury

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.
-- Pico Iyer

#Distance #World #Should

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

#Writing #Conscious

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

#Home #Privilege #Movement

Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
-- Pico Iyer

#Dream #Jobs #Giving Up

Perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in LA thinks he knows Cambodia because he's seen The Killing Fields on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows LA because he's seen City of Angels on video.
-- Pico Iyer

#Angel #Thinking #Cities

I take very seriously the sense of our living these days in a global neighborhood. And the first sensible thing to do in such circumstances, as well as one of the most rewarding things, is to go and meet the neighbors, find out who they are, and what they think and feel. So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.
-- Pico Iyer

#Adventure #Responsibility #Thinking

Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on.
-- Pico Iyer

#Being In Love #Love Is #Littles

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

#Home #Born

Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.
-- Pico Iyer

#Tragedy #Comedy

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
-- Pico Iyer

#Serendipity #Caprice #Guides

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.
-- Pico Iyer

#Christmas #Japan #Years

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

#Eye #Heart #World

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

#School #Men #Doubt

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

#Father #Mirrors #Parent

As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.
-- Pico Iyer

#Writing #Important #Alive

Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think....In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.
-- Pico Iyer

#Faith #Inspiration #Thinking

I do think it’s only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it’s only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about… and find a home.
-- Pico Iyer

#Home #Thinking #Movement

In the end, we need two things to lead a balanced life - a sense of the world and a sense of ourselves; it's like breathing in and breathing out. And if you can only get to know the world by stepping out, and losing yourself in experience, you can only get to know the self by stepping back, and finding yourself in contemplation. One without the other leads to a kind of madness.
-- Pico Iyer

#Motivational #Self #Breathing

Visiting a new town is like having a conversation. Places ask questions of you just as searchingly as you question them. And, as in any conversation, it helps to listen with an open mind, so you can be led somewhere unexpected. The more you leave assumptions at home, I've found, the better you can hear whatever it is that a destination is trying to say to you.
-- Pico Iyer

#Motivational #Home #Mind

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

#Eden #Curiosity #Purgatory

A lack of affiliation may mean a lack of accountability, and forming a sense of commitment can be hard without a sense of community. Displacement can encourage the wrong kinds of distance, and if the nationalism we see sparking up around the globe arises from too narrow and fixed a sense of loyalty, the internationalism that's coming to birth may reflect too roaming and undefined a sense of belonging.
-- Pico Iyer

#Loyalty #Distance #Mean

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

#Sometimes

Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.
-- Pico Iyer

#Lonely #Wavelength #Visitors

None of the things in life - like love or faith - was arrived at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder.
-- Pico Iyer

#Thinking #Thunder

Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources – it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources.
-- Pico Iyer

#Years #Luxury #Silence

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

#Home #Soul #Soil

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

#Thinking #Forget

And it’s only by going nowhere - by sitting still or letting my mind relax - that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.
-- Pico Iyer

#Mind #Relax #Sitting

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

#Age #Attention #Distraction

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

#Age #Acceleration #Exhilarating

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

#Adventure #Responsibility #Discovery

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

#Travel #Wordsworth #Mood

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

#Racing

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

#Way #Communicate

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

#Thinking #Littles #Holy

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

#Technology #Tools #Teach

I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.
-- Pico Iyer

#Eye #Home #Facts

Hello Kitty will never speak.
-- Pico Iyer

#Hello #Speak #Kitties

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.
-- Pico Iyer

#Girl #Teenager #Average

The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.
-- Pico Iyer

#Machines #Use #Information

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

#Dream #Heart #America