290 Quotes by Pico Iyer

What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady. To be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together, and they would not trust or want to listen to one another; but each is a piece of a stained-glass whole without which I couldn’t make sense to myself, or to the world outside.

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.

All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

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?

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.

Making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.

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?

We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

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.