Top 100 Pico Iyer Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Pico Iyer

2. “In an age of speed, I began to think nothing could be more exhilarating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

— Pico Iyer

3. “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, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”

— Pico Iyer

4. “Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.”

— Pico Iyer

5. “Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. Its the place where you become yourself.”

— Pico Iyer

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

— Pico Iyer

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

— Pico Iyer

8. “In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

— Pico Iyer

9. “Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.”

— Pico Iyer

10. “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

11. “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.”

— Pico Iyer

12. “We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.”

— Pico Iyer

13. “Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways.”

— Pico Iyer

14. “Movement is a fantastic privilege but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to.”

— Pico Iyer

15. “For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.”

— Pico Iyer

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

— Pico Iyer

17. “Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective.”

— Pico Iyer

18. “One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.”

— Pico Iyer

19. “Its no coincidence that the word holiday suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.”

— Pico Iyer

20. “For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.”

— Pico Iyer

21. “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. – Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz.”

— Pico Iyer

22. “The beauty of any first time is that it leads to a thousand others...”

— Pico Iyer

23. “Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year – or at least forty-five hours – and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.”

— Pico Iyer

24. “For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, Wheres your home? I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.”

— Pico Iyer

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

— Pico Iyer

26. “As Henry David Thoreau, one of the great explorers of his time, reminded himself in his journal, “It matters not where or how far you travel – the farther commonly the worse – but how much alive you are.” Two.”

— Pico Iyer

27. “So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.”

— Pico Iyer

28. “It so often happens that somebody says ‘change your life’ and you repaint your car rather than re-wire the engine.”

— Pico Iyer

29. “In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished.”

— Pico Iyer

30. “The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.”

— Pico Iyer

31. “And just as it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love – our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything – so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk.”

— Pico Iyer

32. “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?”

— Pico Iyer

33. “Suffering is the central fact of life, from his Buddhist viewpoint; it’s what we do with it that defines our lives.”

— Pico Iyer

34. “If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards.”

— Pico Iyer

35. “You don’t get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.”

— Pico Iyer

36. “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

37. “Yes, I love that word “absorption” because I think that’s my definition of happiness. I think all of us know we are happiest when we forget ourselves, when we forget the time, when we lose ourselves in a beautiful piece of music or a movie or a deep conversation with a friend or an intimate encounter with someone we love. That’s our definition of happiness.”

— Pico Iyer

38. “Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you’re really seeing are not his limitations but yours.”

— Pico Iyer

39. “For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.”

— Pico Iyer

40. “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.”

— Pico Iyer

41. “To Marcel Duchamp’s blithe “There is no solution, because there is no problem,” the Japanese visual artist Shigeko Kubota replied, “There is no problem, because there is no solution.”

— Pico Iyer

42. “The more we run from a problem, the more we’re actually running into it.”

— Pico Iyer

43. “Hello Kitty will never speak.”

— Pico Iyer

44. “Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice.”

— Pico Iyer

45. “You rebel against your parents until you become them. One day you look in the mirror and you see your father’s face.”

— Pico Iyer

46. “Sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it;.”

— Pico Iyer

47. “In the past, Ive visited remote places – North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island – partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldnt ordinarily explore.”

— Pico Iyer

48. “The quintessential Japanese balance, I thought: to surrender all of yourself to an illusion, and yet somewhere, in some part of yourself, to know all the while that it is an illusion.”

— Pico Iyer

49. “The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.”

— Pico Iyer

50. “But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.”

— Pico Iyer