Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Choices
Clear
Stuff
Moments
Take
Minds
Every
Choice
Mind
Bits
Small

More quotes by Pico Iyer

Image
America has a hold on imaginations that no other country does. I think that is partly because it is an immigrant country and there is still a kind of innocence in America that translates very well everywhere in the world.
Pico Iyer
Image
He [Dalai Lama] feels, and I feel, and everyone feels the suffering and frustration of the Tibetans who long for action, who long for a militant response. But, in some ways very few of those individuals have ever been in the position of being head of state.
Pico Iyer
Image
The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
Pico Iyer
Image
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
Image
I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.
Pico Iyer
Image
There's so much visible stuff around now, we're tempted to forget that it's usually the invisible that matters most.
Pico Iyer
Image
He [The Dalai Lama] has made it his mission to say, We can't afford to squabble over minor differences, we have to concentrate on what we have in common, our common mission, our common culture - and indeed what we have in common with the rest of the world.
Pico Iyer
Image
The Dalai Lama says Tibet and the modern world can engage in a conversation perhaps Tibet has something to share with the rest of us based on its researches into mind, and we have a lot that we can share with Tibet.
Pico Iyer
Image
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
Image
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves and we travel, next to find ourselves.
Pico Iyer
Image
I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would.
Pico Iyer
Image
When I was two years old, I heard about his [Dalai Lama] flight from Tibet. Being very little, I said, Oh, good Tibetans, bad Chinese. Those were the black-and-white ways that I thought.
Pico Iyer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When one questions [Dalai Lama's] political actions, it is worth remembering that he's the single most experienced politician on the planet at this moment.
Pico Iyer
Image
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.
Pico Iyer
Image
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
Image
Mr. Trump doesn't radiate many of the qualities I respect. But what do I know? I've never met Trump. I know he's savvy enough to change his tune according to his audience and I don't know very much at all about how government works.
Pico Iyer