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

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Travel
Habit
Home
Really
Homes
Habits
Leaving

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
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Yet [Dalai Lama] has said very strongly that basic freedoms of thought and speech have to be respected in Tibet and they're not at the moment. Tolerance doesn't mean accepting what's unfair.
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In a world full of shifting borders, everything is happening all at once in every possible direction.
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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.
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As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation.
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I think China's view of freedom has to do with material wealth and modernity, and the Dalai's Lama view of freedom is liberation in the Buddhist sense, which is freedom from ignorance and freedom from suffering.
Pico Iyer
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For citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands.
Pico Iyer
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In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.
Pico Iyer
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With the war in Iraq, he [Dalai Lama] feels that the causes of that lie maybe hundreds of years ago, and he says, What we do now may have consequences far into the future that we will never see.
Pico Iyer
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Often when we think of exile we think of destruction or loss. But the Dalai Lama always says exile is reality, it's something we can make use of, and he has used it to get rid of everything that he thought was stifling and old, and to create a new, improved and much healthier Tibet.
Pico Iyer
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I remember many years ago, I asked [Dalai Lama] about exile and he said: Well, exile is good because it's brought me and my people closer to reality, and reality is almost a shrine before which he sits. Exile brings us up against the wall and forces us to rise to the challenge of the moment.
Pico Iyer
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Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year - or at least forty-five hours - and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.
Pico Iyer
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Dalai Lama is very interested in learning from and sharing tips with people in other traditions, but he always stresses that we shouldn't underestimate the important differences between them.
Pico Iyer
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So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.
Pico Iyer
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A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.
Pico Iyer
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The Australians, it seems to me, thrive on their remoteness from the world and see it as a way of keeping up a code of No worries, mate, while peddling their oddities to visitors: nonconformity is at once a fact of life for many, and a selling point.
Pico Iyer
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Literally, when you wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning in Havana you don't know where you'll be at noon. But it's a safe guess that you'll either be married, arrested, or in the midst of some incredible transaction where somebody is stealing your passport or paying you in Dominican pesos for it, or whatever. It's a wild place.
Pico Iyer
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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
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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
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The Dalai Lama, these days, encourages Westerners not to take up Buddhism, partly because he feels that our roots are deep in other traditions, and we should go deeper into our own traditions rather than just acquiring the surfaces of others.
Pico Iyer