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

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Still
Nothing
Urgent
Constant
Sitting
Movement
Age
Stills

More quotes by 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
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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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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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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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I'm one of those perverse people who likes being alone. I always took myself to be a community of one. That's what I am comfortable with.
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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Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.
Pico Iyer
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Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.
Pico Iyer
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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
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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
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[The Dalai Lama ] says Western traditions can teach Tibetans a lot about social action, and he thinks some Christians are very good at that.
Pico Iyer
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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
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Dalai Lama has not coming to show us his kindness, so that we can enjoy his charisma, he's coming with a specific message for the specific circumstances of the world today.
Pico Iyer
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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.
Pico Iyer
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Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
Pico Iyer
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Most of us who have been lucky enough to hear, read and see the Dalai Lama, often come away thinking, What a kind, inspiring and golden human being! That is true, but I think it does him an injustice.
Pico Iyer
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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.
Pico Iyer
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To this day, at my relatively advanced age, I still don't have a place I can really call home. I've never bought property. I just move between temporary base camps. I know that the very notion of home, of having a family or community, is a hard one for me to embrace.
Pico Iyer
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I'd spent thirty years visiting the Dalai Lama, and twenty years as a journalist going to difficult places, war zones and revolutions from North Korea to Haiti and Beirut to Sri Lanka, and the question came up: What does this man have to offer to this world which seems so torn up and so attached to conflict?
Pico Iyer
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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