updated 5mo ago
A Beginner's Guide to Japan
In Buddhism, the opposite of pleasure is not pain but delusion.
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer
A Japanese psychiatrist asked every prospective patient to keep a daily journal. He consented to see each one only after all her sentences were devoted to the world outside her.
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer
Words only separate what silence brings together.
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer
“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be,” said Cary Grant, “until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer
“It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer
Everything is deeply personal; it just has nothing to do with you.
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer
“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer
“Consistency,” Wilde declared in an essay, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer
Soon after the war, Japan’s most assertive novelist, Yukio Mishima, published a book whose title—Confessions of a Mask—was pure Wilde, as were its sentiments: “It is precisely what people regard as my true self that is a masquerade.”
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.
from A Beginner's Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer