Pico Iyer Quotes

When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.

Psychologists call it "defocused attention," where you broaden your horizons, let your mind float and drift a bit. Coffee keeps us sharp and alert. It's great if you're driving at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's not so great if you're trying to come up with the next violin concerto.

Meditation applies the brakes to the mind.

You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

Let your mind alone, and see what happens.

The brilliant thing about swimming is that, while you're doing it, there's nothing else you could be getting on with, like the ironing or sorting out the children. My mind goes into free-float mode; some of the best ideas for plots come into my head while I'm ploughing up and down the pool.

I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process.

I try to sit still for about 15 minutes each morning without making lists or running in overdrive.

Doing something that's physical but not necessarily mentally taxing - for me, it frees me up creatively.

I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you.

Daydreaming with pencil and paper is a respectable form of meditation.

Imagine a hot tub for the mind. That is what meditation is; it can bathe your mind in relaxing thoughts.

The true creativity comes out of sitting silently. When you are so totally quiet that there is no thought, no wave in the ocean of your being, out of this silence comes a different kind of creativity.

After having stopped the lower activities of the mind, it must be made receptive; and, instead of weaving all kinds of empty and idle thoughts, the mind should receive intuitions from above.

Sometimes it's better to just be quiet, to not think of anything at all. Out of silence comes the greatest creativity.

Meditation stops the sound-loving mind.

I daydream a lot - that's how I get my ideas. If I'm sitting in a café, I'm not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination.

The only way to cultivate a quiet mind is by planting seeds of silence.

When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.

This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

Think, the successful idea is always in your mind. Think it out.

When the mind is left without anything to cling to, it becomes still.

Look around less, imagine more.