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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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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Ideals
Tend
Gobble
Late
Feasts
Find
Enlarged
Everything
Diminished
Consumed
Gossip
Appetite

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.
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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.
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The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.
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Dalai Lama is transforming those criteria - and the whole way of conducting politics. He's conducting politics in a much deeper way than most politicians are able to. He's the only politician I know of who's a monk. The Pope, of course, is in a similar position, but the Pope isn't in the same way leading a country of many million people.
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Just as there are many more Californians now to be found in the temples of Kyoto or the villages of Bali or the mountains of the Himalayas than ever before, what is also exciting is that one can just go downtown Santa Barbara and find ayurvedic medicine, Thai restaurants, and Japanese cars in abundance.
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You can continue your practice, you can exercise kindness, you can practice meditation whether you're in a prison or a millionaire's house, whether you're in India or Tibet.
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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.
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What we have to do is act as clearly and with as pure motivation as is possible now, and that will sow the seeds for good action maybe in the twenty-second century.
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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.
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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.
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I like the way that American has become a kind of spiritual home even for people who have never seen it. American dreams are strongest of all in the hearts of people who have only seen America in their dreams. I think it's refreshing and reviving to go around the world and see how America still occupies this special place.
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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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.
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I think people like me are in a relatively privileged position because we have to some extent chosen to live in foreign places. I would always make the distinction between those who are exiles in terms of being thrown out of the place they want to be, and others who are exiles in terms of going toward a place they would rather be.
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The Dalai Lama says don't pray for peace, don't wait for peace, don't talk about peace - do it right now.
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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.
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For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.
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It so often happens that somebody says 'change your life' and you repaint your car rather than re-wire the engine.
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I've also learned from [Dalai Lama] that we make the world by how we choose to look at it. In any situation you can make it constructive or dismaying, depending on that powerful computer we call the mind.
Pico Iyer
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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