290 Quotes by Pico Iyer

Travel is an act of humility.

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.

A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.

Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life,” Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, “is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

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.

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

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