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" 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
Never
My Life
Life
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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
Teach
Best
Information
" 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
First Time
Time
Consciousness
" 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
Today
Great
Responsibility
" 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
Financial
Poor
World
" Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise. "
Pico Iyer
World
Experience
Writing
" 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
You
Never
Turn
" I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me. "
Pico Iyer
Travel
Time
Interesting
" We readily go to the health club when our doctor suggests we need more exercise, but we regularly neglect the 'mental health club' that our well-being more truly requires. "
Pico Iyer
Mental Health
Exercise
Doctor
" I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within. "
Pico Iyer
Travel
Journey
Think
" If we want to talk about Gross Natural Product, we have to talk about the King of Bhutan's index of Gross National Happiness, too. Certainly I have found, as many travellers before me, that people in the poorest places are often the readiest to shower me, from an affluent country, with hospitality and kindness. "
Pico Iyer
Me
People
Happiness
" 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
New York
World
Map
" Though I knew that poverty certainly didn't buy happiness, I wasn't convinced that money did, either. "
Pico Iyer
Poverty
Buy
Either
" I suppose even when I was growing up, I noticed I was most happy when I was absorbed in something, lost in the moment and forgot the time, whether was conversation, movie, or a game I was playing. That was my definition of happiness. And I was least happy when I was all over the place, distracted and restless. "
Pico Iyer
Game
Happiness
Happy
" Movement is a fantastic privilege... but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to. "
Pico Iyer
Back
You
Privilege
" 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
Me
Love
Need
" It's only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. "
Pico Iyer
Listening
Day
Voice
" 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
Change
Best
Imagination
" 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
Fun
World
Think
" Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer. "
Pico Iyer
Years
Ahead
Great
" 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
Change The World
Moment
Change
" Abjure all accretions and turn off the lights. Put on some music - Leonard Cohen, say, perhaps his 'Various Positions' - and let your mind cool down. Soon you'll forget there's a word called 'stress.' "
Pico Iyer
Music
You
Stress
" Home is, in the end, not just the place where you sleep, but the place where you stand. "
Pico Iyer
Home
Place
Sleep
" We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. "
Pico Iyer
Say
Ways
More
" Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. "
Pico Iyer
Daily
Worry
Think
" A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet. "
Pico Iyer
Reading
Writer
Lines
" 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
Challenge
Adventure
Hungry
" 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
Hands
World
Try
" I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation. "
Pico Iyer
I Can
School
Birthday
" 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
Feet
World
Feel
" 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
You
Nature
Human Nature