Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight. Pico Iyer Read Quote
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 Read Quote
It’s an old principle, as old as the Buddha or Marcus Aurelius: We need at times to step away from our lives in order to put them in perspective. Especially if we wish to be productive. Pico Iyer Read Quote
In the past, I’ve visited remote places – North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island – partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn’t ordinarily explore. Pico Iyer Read Quote
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Pico Iyer Read Quote
Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can’t get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head. Pico Iyer Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
You need to rebel to see the other options and to get a much richer, fuller sense of the world. And it’s only once you’ve worked through that and seen through that that you can come back and accept who you are. You have to try all the other options. Pico Iyer Read Quote
