The collection / 38 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

38 results · Page 1 of 2Play this collection ▷

01c. 1957 AD

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

02c. 1957 AD

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

03c. 1957 AD

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.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

04c. 1957 AD

... a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

05c. 1957 AD

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

06c. 1957 AD

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

07c. 1957 AD

...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

08c. 1957 AD

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

09c. 1957 AD

You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is...frozen.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

10c. 1957 AD

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

11c. 1957 AD

...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

12c. 1957 AD

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

13c. 1957 AD

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

14c. 1957 AD

Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

15c. 1957 AD

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

16c. 1957 AD

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 / quote

↗

17c. 1957 AD

Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go?

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

18c. 1957 AD

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 / quote

↗

19c. 1957 AD

My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

20c. 1957 AD

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 / quote

↗

21c. 1957 AD

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 / quote

↗

22c. 1957 AD

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 / quote

↗

23c. 1957 AD

It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that's necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut.

Pico Iyer / quote

↗

24c. 1957 AD

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 / quote

↗