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The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.

Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: February 11
Essayist
Novelist
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer
Beauty
Snaps
Awake
Foreign

More quotes by Pico Iyer

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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.
Pico Iyer
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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.
Pico Iyer
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We travel, initially, to lose ourselves and we travel, next to find ourselves.
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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In a world full of shifting borders, everything is happening all at once in every possible direction.
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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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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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
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The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.
Pico Iyer
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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.
Pico Iyer
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I suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life
Pico Iyer
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Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.
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.
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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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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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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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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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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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