110+ Pico Iyer Quotes On Education, Identity And Self

Pico Iyer is an Indian writer and essayist known for his travel writing, literary journalism, and essays on global affairs. He is the author of numerous books, including Video Night in Kathmandu and The Global Soul. Iyer has been a long-time contributing writer for Time magazine and is a frequent contributor to Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Pico Iyer on love, education, identity.

Top 10 Pico Iyer Quotes

1. In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
2. Hello Kitty will never speak.
3. Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.
4. Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.
5. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
6. We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves.
7. We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
8. 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?
9. All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
10. We can better see what we don't have. The other man's grass is always greener and now we can actually go and visit his grass much more and feel the absence of green in our own lives.

Pico Iyer Short Quotes

• A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.
• Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.
• In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.
• In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.
• The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.
• I often think we're most happy when we forget the time.
• The more we run from a problem, the more we're actually running into it.
• The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
• For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.
• We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

Pico Iyer Quotes About Love

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end. — Pico Iyer

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

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. — Pico Iyer

Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love. — Pico Iyer

Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on. — Pico Iyer

As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love. — Pico Iyer

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

Pico Iyer Quotes About Travel

Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. — Pico Iyer

Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year - or at least forty-five hours - and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. — Pico Iyer

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. — Pico Iyer

So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation. — Pico Iyer

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

Travel, in the superficial sense at least, is a good cure for loneliness. When you travel, especially in the third world, you quickly find that you get more friends than you know what to do with. — Pico Iyer

Travel is an act of humility — Pico Iyer

Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits. — Pico Iyer

My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible. — Pico Iyer

I think that mass communications as well as mass travel have made the whole world available to us in ways that they haven't been. As with any kind of freedom, the more of it that one has the greater the need for limit and restraint. But I think that it's a nice challenge to be saddled with. — Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer Quotes About Stillness

In an age of speed, I began to think nothing could be more exhilarating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still. — Pico Iyer

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

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

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

Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective. — Pico Iyer

Adventure today means finding one's way back to the silence and stillness of a thousand years ago. — Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer Quotes About Home

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. — Pico Iyer

Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself. — Pico Iyer

For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul. — Pico Iyer

I do think it’s only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it’s only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about… and find a home. — Pico Iyer

...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down. — Pico Iyer

Movement is a fantastic privilege but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to. — Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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. — Pico Iyer

Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger — Pico Iyer

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. — Pico Iyer

In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished. — Pico Iyer

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

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

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

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. — Pico Iyer

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

The more internationalism there is in the world, the more nationalism there will always be, as people feel scared of the Other streaming into their neighbourhood and don't always know where to lay their foundations in a world on the move. — Pico Iyer

If you'd asked me some years ago, I would have said [Dalai Lama] is an extraordinarily compassionate, clear-sighted, calm human being. But now, I'm more convinced than ever that his political positions as well as his spiritual positions arise out of such precise and realistic thinking that they're extremely sound. — Pico Iyer

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

I remember many years ago, I asked [Dalai Lama] about exile and he said: "Well, exile is good because it's brought me and my people closer to reality," and reality is almost a shrine before which he sits. Exile brings us up against the wall and forces us to rise to the challenge of the moment. — Pico Iyer

Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours. — Pico Iyer

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table. — Pico Iyer

Gandhi or Bishop Tutu or the Dalai Lama. I think they're really embodiments of what we aspire to and, by keeping them in our heads, we're reminding ourselves of who we could be. That's what we're hoping to climb up towards. — Pico Iyer

Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams. — Pico Iyer

Just as there are many more Californians now to be found in the temples of Kyoto or the villages of Bali or the mountains of the Himalayas than ever before, what is also exciting is that one can just go downtown Santa Barbara and find ayurvedic medicine, Thai restaurants, and Japanese cars in abundance. — Pico Iyer

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. — Pico Iyer

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

I suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life — Pico Iyer

Living here in California, I think one of the scariest things about California is the fact that it is rewriting its script and changing constantly and so many people don't know who they will be and who they will be with a year from now. — Pico Iyer

[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

Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources – it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. — Pico Iyer

But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. — Pico Iyer

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice — Pico Iyer

Any school would gain, if the students began the day with meditation, cleared their heads and got themselves centered. — Pico Iyer

I think Dalai Lama is always careful about stressing that people be led into the practice by somebody who knows what's going on. — Pico Iyer

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

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

Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave. — Pico Iyer

The Dalai Lama would say that meditation is something that can help everyone. But he's aware that it can be misused or things can go wrong. — Pico Iyer

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. — Pico Iyer

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

I love the fact that we can't explain coincidences. I think it's like sometimes you walk into a crowded room and you'll see a stranger and you feel as if you know her better than the friends that you came with. And the very fact that you can't explain it is what gives it its power, that it lies in some deeper or mysterious realm, I think. — Pico Iyer

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come. — Pico Iyer

I would now put all my heart with the Tibetan people and the Tibetan cause, but not at the expense of the Chinese, and not say that Tibetans are good and Chinese are bad. And in my own life, I hope I would learn to be a little less full of right and wrongs, and a little more able to see everything as a potential right. — Pico Iyer

Because I don't belong entirely to Britain or the U.S. or India or Japan, I build my foundations in some way deeper than mere passports, and more in the light of where I'm going than of "where I come from." — Pico Iyer

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

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

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

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain. — Pico Iyer

As soon as I'm on the road, I see, often palpably, that I know nothing at all, which is always a great liberation. — Pico Iyer

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

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

The Dalai Lama says that when a Catholic and a Buddhist speak, the Buddhist becomes a deeper Buddhist and the Catholic becomes a deeper Catholic. — Pico Iyer

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

It's impressive that a man [Dalai Lama], on the day after his Nobel Prize was announced, in October, 1989, said to me, "I really wonder if my efforts are enough?" Most of us, if we just won the Nobel Prize, would think this is vindication, or at last there's a chance for Tibet. He's the rare person who thinks, as a Buddha would, "I don't know if I've done enough, I don't know if I will do enough." — Pico Iyer

The Dalai Lama, these days, encourages Westerners not to take up Buddhism, partly because he feels that our roots are deep in other traditions, and we should go deeper into our own traditions rather than just acquiring the surfaces of others. — Pico Iyer

There's so much visible stuff around now, we're tempted to forget that it's usually the invisible that matters most. — Pico Iyer

In the end, we need two things to lead a balanced life - a sense of the world and a sense of ourselves; it's like breathing in and breathing out. And if you can only get to know the world by stepping out, and losing yourself in experience, you can only get to know the self by stepping back, and finding yourself in contemplation. One without the other leads to a kind of madness. — Pico Iyer

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

In a world full of shifting borders, everything is happening all at once in every possible direction. — Pico Iyer

More than any religious figure that I can think of, Dalai Lama goes out of his way to attend interfaith conferences; religious harmony is one of his urgent priorities in life. — Pico Iyer

Unlike many spiritual leaders, Dalai Lama is never been in a position to just sit on a mountain top handing out wisdom. He's had to live out his principles in the middle of this very complex situation, every day for sixty years or more. I think it's something that moves many people about his example. — Pico Iyer

I take very seriously the sense of our living these days in a global neighborhood. And the first sensible thing to do in such circumstances, as well as one of the most rewarding things, is to go and meet the neighbors, find out who they are, and what they think and feel. So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation. — Pico Iyer

The Dalai Lama acknowledges that he's met Westerners who to some extent are clearly Easterners at heart, and he would never want them not to become Buddhists just because they happened to be born in California. — Pico Iyer

I like the way that American has become a kind of spiritual home even for people who have never seen it. American dreams are strongest of all in the hearts of people who have only seen America in their dreams. I think it's refreshing and reviving to go around the world and see how America still occupies this special place. — Pico Iyer

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

One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory. — Pico Iyer

A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation. — Pico Iyer

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

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. — Pico Iyer

I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated. — Pico Iyer

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

[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. — Pico Iyer

Destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them. — Pico Iyer

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed. — Pico Iyer

Visiting a new town is like having a conversation. Places ask questions of you just as searchingly as you question them. And, as in any conversation, it helps to listen with an open mind, so you can be led somewhere unexpected. The more you leave assumptions at home, I've found, the better you can hear whatever it is that a destination is trying to say to you. — Pico Iyer

Many people would say that A Tibetan monk, even in Lhasa, may be free while the ruler of China may not be free. — Pico Iyer

Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology. — Pico Iyer

Life Lessons by Pico Iyer

1. Pico Iyer's writing emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment, accepting the impermanence of life, and finding joy in the small moments.
2. His work encourages us to be open to new experiences, to appreciate the beauty of the world around us, and to cultivate meaningful relationships with others.
3. Through his writing, Pico Iyer encourages us to cultivate a sense of inner peace and contentment, regardless of our external circumstances.