The Half Known Life Quotes

“But the half known life is where so many of our possibilities lie. In the realm of worldly affairs it can be a tragedy that so many of us in our global neighborhood choose to see other places through screens, reducing fellow humans to two dimensions. On a deeper level, however, it’s everything half known, from love to faith to wonder and terror, that determines the course of our lives.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“At last I pushed some of the money into his hand, knowing full well that he would feel cheated—and suffer—if I didn’t. My research had reminded me of the custom of ta’arof, or never saying exactly what you mean, and three-part refusals. But I’d barely guessed, when reading of Iran, how hard it might be in life to tell where custom ends and conviction begins.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“And the question at the heart of every one was as simple as it was unanswerable: how make peace and passion rhyme?”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“reality is neither an insult nor an aberration, but the partner with whom we have to make our lives”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“And I knew that Iran’s poets echoed what I’d read in the wise, anonymous fourteenth-century guide to clear living, The Cloud of Unknowing: “By our love, the divine may be reached and held; by our thinking, never.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“It reminded me of what Thomas Merton had found in the smiling Buddhas of Sri Lanka, “filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing.” It explained why the extreme renunciates here lived beside graves and drank from skulls, having ceased to make any distinction between purity and its opposite. As Merton had put it, with unflinching economy, “The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“I would just let life come to me in all its happy confusion and find the holiness in that.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“always saw him avoid the otherworldly; the meaning of life, he said, lies in what we can do right now. When people came to him in search of blessings, he stressed that he was no miracle worker. “You bless yourself with your actions,” he explained. “For example, give money to a school.” Once, in a private audience, I’d seen a Korean man exclaim, in his excitement, “You will go to the Pure Land!” The Dalai Lama replied by quoting the First Dalai Lama: “I don’t want to go to the Pure Land. I want to serve where I am needed.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“I thought then of the stirring words of the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr: our goal in life, he often stressed, is not to become spiritual, but to become human.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“the fact of suffering and the ways we have to work through it. Paradise has to be found not just in the middle of life, but in the midst of death; this city of burning bodies was a little like the skull on a monastic’s desk, reminding us that time is never so limitless as we think.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“The two sturdy souls beside me in the car seemed to have little thought about living in “Shangri-La”—and much more about making the real world as rich as possible.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“coming? Or might the absence of outsiders in fact lead to a fading of local interest in traditional medicine as well as a falling off of resources? Even to a sense among the young that they had to abandon their homeland if they wished to be in touch with the possibilities of the modern world?”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“You have to analyze, research real causes and conditions and take the long view, he always stressed, before coming up with any plan. Pursuing an unrealistic dream was an insult to reality, as well as to dreamer and to dream.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“modernity. The core of Buddhist thinking was interdependence—“Indra’s Net,” as it’s been called—and for a culture or a person to be cut off from others was to condemn it to a kind of nonexistence.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“James Hilton’s book remained unexpectedly attuned to the Buddhism of the region it evoked (even as it ascribed those principles to Christians): its central notion claimed that “perhaps you’ve always been a part of Shangri-La without knowing it.” Yet it’s in the nature of a hospital to get crowded with the infirm, often contagious in their unease.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“paradise on earth” can remain itself only by changing with the times.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“Shangri-La exists exclusively in the imagination, he would say—and the word itself, it’s often asserted, is a corruption of “Shambhala,” referring to a mythical Tibetan kingdom that stands for a state of mind. Real life can offer us pleasures that fantasy leaves out.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“Days, sometimes weeks, in the silence had given me a taste of what lies on the far side of our thoughts. Who we become—cease to become—when we put all ideas and theories behind us.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“PLEASE,” said the sign there, “No Explanations Inside the Church.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“I was all set to draw conclusions from this when I learned that there were nineteen factions within the ultra-Orthodox community alone, so anything I could say about one person was probably disproved by his neighbor.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“Paradise could seem the cruelest notion of all if it meant pretending that the real world didn’t exist.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“For centuries, in fact, Kashmir had seemed an answer to many of the world’s divisions. It was from here that the ecumenical emperor Ashoka, three hundred years before the death of Christ, had sent Buddhist teachers across Asia to pass on the value of seeing the interdependence of every living thing. It was”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“Once in a lifetime . . . hope and history rhyme.” Heaney’s life in Belfast had shown him, every hour, how brutally history mocks hope; yet he was wise enough to know that a life that doesn’t know possibility takes in only half the truth.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“Melville’s sorrow lay not just in his restless inquiries, but in his hope for answers in a world that seems always to simmer in a state of answerlessness.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“provincial, the Age of Information seemed to leave us knowing less about the rest of the world than ever before—and least of all about the places we heard most about.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“death. A true paradise has meaning only after one has outgrown all notions of perfection and taken the measure of the fallen world.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“The pursuit of happiness made deepest sense, I came to think, when seen in the framework of the Eastern awareness that suffering is the first truth of existence.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“Hafez professed to have no interest in names or distinctions: he was neither Christian nor Hindu nor Muslim nor Buddhist nor Jew, this teacher of Koranic studies wrote in one celebrated poem; heaven was the place where such divisions fell away.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise

“. . . . all religions are different paths to the summit of the same mountain.”
― Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise