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The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.
Hello Kitty will never speak.
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.
All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady. To be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together, and they would not trust or want to listen to one another; but each is a piece of a stained-glass whole without which I couldn't make sense to myself, or to the world outside.
I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.
Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.
I suddenly realized I was racing around so much, I could never catch up with my life
In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
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.
Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger
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?
Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.
So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.
In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.
In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.
Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective.
A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.
The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
What we have to do is act as clearly and with as pure motivation as is possible now, and that will sow the seeds for good action maybe in the twenty-second century.
With the war in Iraq, he [Dalai Lama] feels that the causes of that lie maybe hundreds of years ago, and he says, \'What we do now may have consequences far into the future that we will never see.\'
Dalai Lama is taking a subtle and nuanced view of politics and he is thinking in terms of events well beyond our lifetime.
He [Dalai Lama] feels, and I feel, and everyone feels the suffering and frustration of the Tibetans who long for action, who long for a militant response. But, in some ways very few of those individuals have ever been in the position of being head of state.
Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954; he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics.
When one questions [Dalai Lama's] political actions, it is worth remembering that he's the single most experienced politician on the planet at this moment.
Yet [Dalai Lama] has said very strongly that basic freedoms of thought and speech have to be respected in Tibet and they're not at the moment. Tolerance doesn't mean accepting what's unfair.
Many people would say that A Tibetan monk, even in Lhasa, may be free while the ruler of China may not be free.
I think China's view of freedom has to do with material wealth and modernity, and the Dalai's Lama view of freedom is liberation in the Buddhist sense, which is freedom from ignorance and freedom from suffering.