We can’t change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world – and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment. – Pico Iyer
The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who’s never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means. – Pico Iyer
I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads – in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation – that if I really want to change my life, I might best begin by changing my mind. – Pico Iyer
Movement is a fantastic privilege… but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to. – Pico Iyer
Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think… All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world. – Pico Iyer
I’ve never meditated in my life. I don’t practice yoga nor any religion. I’m a tourist on the realm of stillness. – Pico Iyer
All of us are feeling scattered and distracted as we try to keep up with an accelerating world. But nearly all of us have an answer in our hands, in simply choosing to do nothing and go nowhere for a while. – Pico Iyer
One of the happier ironies of recent history is that even as Tibet is being wiped off the map in Tibet itself, here it is in California, in Switzerland, in Japan. All over the world, Tibetan Buddhism is now part of the neighborhood. In 1968, there were two Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West. By 2000, there were 40 in New York alone. – Pico Iyer
The first time I stepped onto the rooftop of the Potala Palace in Lhasa in 1985, I felt, as never before or since, as if I was stepping onto the rooftop of my being: onto some dimension of consciousness that I’d never visited before. – Pico Iyer
I’m very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can’t think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not. – Pico Iyer
In financial terms, my sense is that the distribution of wealth, unequal as it is, is self-perpetuating, and, especially in a linked and accelerating world, the rich get ever more quickly richer while the poor get ever more speedily poorer. – Pico Iyer
To me, part of the beauty of a comma is that it offers a rest, like one in music: a break that gives the whole piece of music greater shape, deeper harmony. It allows us to catch our breath. – Pico Iyer
In Japan, I live in a little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I don’t have a bicycle or a car or anything, so my only movement is within the boundaries of my feet. I feel there’s a need for that kind of conscientious objection to the momentum of the world. – Pico Iyer
The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with. – Pico Iyer
I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling. But there’s something about it that you can’t turn away from. – Pico Iyer
Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord’s Prayer in Latin every Sunday night. – Pico Iyer
I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. – Pico Iyer
I think it’s in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you. – Pico Iyer
The less you struggle with a problem, the more it’s likely to solve itself. The less time you spend frantically running around, the more productive you are likely to be. – Pico Iyer
Travel for me is all about transformation, and I’m fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they’d have written off not a month before. – Pico Iyer
You can only make sense of the online world by going offline and by getting the wisdom and emotional clarity to know how to make the best use of the Internet. – Pico Iyer
A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about. – Pico Iyer
A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure. – Pico Iyer
If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication – and end up shouting at one another in block capitals. – Pico Iyer
The recipe to an unhappy life in Japan is to want to be Japanese if you are not. Anyone who wants to penetrate the country is setting themselves up for tears and disappointment. – Pico Iyer
Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer. – Pico Iyer
In many a piece of music, it’s the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe. – Pico Iyer
Something in us is telling us we’re moving too fast, at a pace dictated by machines rather than by anything human, and that unless we take conscious measures, we’ll permanently be out of breath. – Pico Iyer
I think at this point I only write books about questions I really want to figure out. They’re indulgences, essentially. I think, ‘What would I like to spend five years really thinking about? What could I gain from thinking about for five years?’ – Pico Iyer
Wherever we are, any time of night or day, our bosses, junk-mailers, our parents can get to us. Sociologists have actually found that in recent years Americans are working fewer hours than 50 years ago, but we feel as if we’re working more. We have more and more time-saving devices, but sometimes, it seems, less and less time. – Pico Iyer