Pico Iyer Quotes
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The ultimate purpose of Zen,' I remembered the roshi telling me, 'is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.
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Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.
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The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
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Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on.
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In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.
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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 [Dalai Lama]is far and away the most solid, deep-thinking, far-sighted politician I've met, and I've been a journalist for 26 years for Time magazine, so I've met a lot of politicians.
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What is fascinating about a place like Los Angeles airport is that it is lots and lots of people, many of whom have saved up all their lives and channeled all of their energies toward coming to the promised land of abundance and plenty - the American Dream. But as soon as they arrive here they get a crash course in the American reality.
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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.
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I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.
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Perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in LA thinks he knows Cambodia because he's seen The Killing Fields on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows LA because he's seen City of Angels on video.
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I wanted to bring the book out right now because I think anyone who cares about Tibet knew there would be disturbances in the run up to the Olympics [2008]. Many Tibetans feel it's their last chance to broadcast their suffering and frustration and pain to the world before the Olympics take place and China is accepted as a modern nation and the world forgets about Tibet.
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In terms of technology and science, tomorrow does know more than yesterday; but when it comes to emotions, living with uncertainty, terror, I'm not sure we know any more than Shakespeare did, or the Buddha. And the power of new things - the iPhone or Facebook - is so strong and intoxicating that we sometimes forget that none of them can fundamentally change our relation to ourselves and to what matters.
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All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
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[The Dalai Lama] told me some years ago, "I've made every concession to China, and I've been as open and tolerant as I could, and still things get worse in Tibet." If you look at it from one point of view, as he himself says, his monastic position of forbearance and nonviolence hasn't reaped any benefits. And yet, he's thinking in terms of the long term, of centuries.
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The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.
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You can see exile as loss, and then it will be a loss for you. You can treat it as opportunity and then all kinds of benefits accrue.
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Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways.
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For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, "Where's your home?" I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.
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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.
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The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.
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Yes, we know more than ever before, and it's a wonder that we get to inhabit a world full of driverless cars and 3D printers. But that doesn't mean that we know any more about the essential things in life - love, faith, death - and it would be dangerous to assume we did. The only thing that gets us through sometimes is a proper, humbled sense that we don't have a clue, we can't be sure what's going to happen next and life will always be much larger than our ideas of it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The more we run from a problem, the more we're actually running into it.
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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.
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A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.
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As a member of the mainstream media for many years, I've learned just one thing: never to trust anything I read in the mainstream media - not because of any agenda or deliberate dissimulation, but simply because it's filtered and comes very often from someone whose judgment I might not trust in other circumstances.
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