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Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Assisted
Caprice
Serendipity
Tour
Guide
Guides

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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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.
Pico Iyer
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There's so much visible stuff around now, we're tempted to forget that it's usually the invisible that matters most.
Pico Iyer
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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.
Pico Iyer
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Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them.
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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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.
Pico Iyer
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Home is essentially a set of values you carry around with you and, like a turtle or a snail or whatever, home has to be something that is part of you and can be equally a part of you wherever you are. I think that not having a home is a good inducement to creating a metaphysical home and to being able to see it in more invisible ways.
Pico Iyer
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The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
Pico Iyer
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Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.
Pico Iyer
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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.
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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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.
Pico Iyer
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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.
Pico Iyer
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The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.
Pico Iyer
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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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Some people will always ground themselves very strongly in a piece of soil, a grandmother's property, a tiny plot of land, and that's great. But in the Age of Movement, there's no question that the number of people who don't - or can't - is growing exponentially.
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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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
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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
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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