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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.

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Lives
Instruction
Use
Central
Cannot
Machines
Manual
Best
Revolution
Manuals
Without
Longer
Healthier
Much
Information
Quicker
Made
Teach
Brighter
Make
Came
Paradox

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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I suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life
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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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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.
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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.
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Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.
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Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
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The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.
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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.
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American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.
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Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954 he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics.
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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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Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself.
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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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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.
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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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I think people's minds are going to have to assimilate in the sense that all the world is international now. The whole world has gone global. I think cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are the models of our future.
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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.
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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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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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So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.
Pico Iyer