Top 100 Huston Smith Quotes
#1. At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome.
Huston Smith
#2. With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming,"
To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life,
And then to come out empty
it is a tragic error. (116)
trans by Robert Thurman
Huston Smith
#3. Human intelligence is a reflection of the intelligence that produces everything. In knowing, we are simply extending the intelligence that comes to and constitutes us. We mimic the mind of God, so to speak. Or better, we continue and extend it.
Huston Smith
#4. After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others; otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.
Huston Smith
#5. So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues.
Huston Smith
#6. Pure science - this vision of the universe as 15 billion light years across - I am bedazzled and awed by it.
Huston Smith
#7. Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.
Huston Smith
#8. Science is like a flashlight in the hands of people living in a huge balloon. They can illuminate anything in the balloon, but cannot shine it outside the balloon to see where it is floating - or if it is floating at all.
Huston Smith
#9. I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions, and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find, and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.
Huston Smith
#10. If it is possible to be homesick for the world, even places one has never been and knows one will never see, this book is the child of such homesickness.
Huston Smith
#11. We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.
Huston Smith
#12. I had assumed that Bush's seemingly inflexible policy to support Sharon was for political reasons of his getting elected. But as to whether he really believes his actions are going to hasten the day of the final conflict, I do not know.
Huston Smith
#13. Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?
Huston Smith
#14. Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion ... religion is institutionalized spirituality. - Mother Jones November/December 1997.
Huston Smith
#15. As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves.
Huston Smith
#16. No one in human history has given as much thought to the interweaving of altered states of consciousness and religion as I have.
Huston Smith
#17. I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.
Huston Smith
#18. You can't understand anything unless you unless you understand everything.
Huston Smith
#19. I don't have any fear of death. I do, however, have an inordinate fear of becoming dependent on other people. To me, that's the severest test, not death.
Huston Smith
#20. The New Age movement looks like a mixed bag. I see much in it that seems good: It's optimistic; it's enthusiastic; it has the capacity for belief. On the debit side, I think one needs to distinguish between belief and credulity.
Huston Smith
#21. Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection.
Huston Smith
#22. Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Huston Smith
#23. The point of the story is that the universe is one gigantic Wishing Tree, with branches that reach into every heart. The cosmic process decrees that sometime or other, in this life or another, each of these wishes will be granted - together, of course, with consequences.
Huston Smith
#24. The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world.
Huston Smith
#25. I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life the way God would have acted if God had assumed human form.
Huston Smith
#26. Whether things turn out for the better depends on what we do. We ought not spend our time masterminding the future, but recognize our marching orders: to do the best we can for history and the planet.
Huston Smith
#27. It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.
Huston Smith
#28. Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for 'art,' because for Indians everything is art.
Huston Smith
#29. There are wonderfully intrinsic moments when life makes sense, and doubts are banished as irrelevant in those moments. Of course, we can't stay in that state. We're not here to be blissed out all the time.
Huston Smith
#30. God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.
Huston Smith
#31. God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. You can express the same thought, but to different people you have to use a different language. It's the same in religion.
Huston Smith
#32. The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm.
Huston Smith
#33. It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
Huston Smith
#34. If human life is to survive on this planet, the old dualistic worldview, with people on one side and the environment on the other, must yield to a new vision that connects us with everything else and leads us to care for and take responsibility for it.
Huston Smith
#36. The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies.
Huston Smith
#38. When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade.
Huston Smith
#39. Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.
Huston Smith
#40. It's often difficult for us to act compassionately, but sacred art eases the difficulty by ennobling us.
Huston Smith
#41. I grew up taking it for granted that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be.
Huston Smith
#42. In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.
Huston Smith
#43. A nation can assume that the addition of the words "under God" to its pledge of allegiance gives evidence that its citizens actually believe in God whereas all it really proves is that they believe in "believing" in God
Huston Smith
#44. Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.
Huston Smith
#45. Conversation can be as mutually incomprehensible as foreign languages. We need the different and complementary perspectives of the various yogas - and ideally of all religions - not only to reach God but to reach each other.
Huston Smith
#46. When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most, not for space travel or the release of nuclear energy, but as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take one another seriously.
Huston Smith
#47. Entheogens are not to be lightly trifled with ... However, if taken with the right attitude and in the proper setting, psychoactive drugs may produce religious experiences ... it is far less clear that they can produce religious lives.
Huston Smith
#48. You subtract Christianity from Huston Smith, and there is no Huston Smith left.
Huston Smith
#49. We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.
Huston Smith
#50. Primal people see the objects of this world not (or not only) as solid but as open windows to their divine source.
Huston Smith
#51. The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
Huston Smith
#52. Everything I do for my private wellbeing adds another layer to my ego, and in thickening it insulates me more from God. Conversely, every act done without thought for myself diminishes my self-centeredness until finally no barrier remains to separate me from the Divine. The
Huston Smith
#53. I think it matters almost infinitely that we practice one of the authentic religions. But if you mean does it make any difference which. The answer is no, as long as each is followed with equal intensity, sincerity, dedication.
Huston Smith
#54. Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field.
Huston Smith
#55. In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.
Huston Smith
#56. Without attention, the human sense of wonder and the holy will stir occasionally, but to become a steady flame it must be tended.
Huston Smith
#57. Science makes major contributions to minor needs, Justice Holmes was fond of saying, adding that religion, however small its successes, is at least at work on the things that matter most.
Huston Smith
#58. Emerson argued that "the whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible, and they are. They want awakening, [and for that purpose they need teachers] to get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep." That
Huston Smith
#59. What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.
Huston Smith
#60. If we take the world's enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.
Huston Smith
#61. To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life's final and fascinating challenge.
Huston Smith
#62. I'm not a chauvinist. I'm a universalist. I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.
Huston Smith
#63. I simply wanted to experience the presence of this man who had revolutionized my understanding. After a while we sat in silence, gazing at the barren canyon walls. And the mute desert seemed to carry on our conversation for us.
Huston Smith
#64. In the post-individualistic era, science and spirituality will become allies, and human beings will realize a vast potentiality now only dimly felt.
Huston Smith
#65. The Buddha is in me, the Buddha is in you. Live up to it.
Huston Smith
#66. The most powerful moral influence is example.
Huston Smith
#67. Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.
Huston Smith
#68. The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits
Huston Smith
#69. The modern period adds social ethics to religions agenda, for we now realize that social structures are not like laws of nature. They are human creations, so we are responsible for them.
Huston Smith
#70. The scientific method is nearly perfect for understanding the physical aspects of our life. But it is a radically limited viewfinder in its inability to offer values, morals and meanings that are at the center of our lives.
Huston Smith
#71. Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times.
Huston Smith
#72. Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and instead to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they encounter in the natural world.
Huston Smith
#73. When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.
Huston Smith
#74. Walnuts have a shell, and they have a kernel. Religions are the same. They have an essence, but then they have a protective coating. This is not the only way to put it. But it's my way. So the kernels are the same. However, the shells are different.
Huston Smith
#75. Today we do not live under a sacred canopy; it is marketing that forms the backdrop of our culture. The message that advertising dins into our conscious and unconscious minds is that fulfillment derives from the things we possess.
Huston Smith
#76. Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home.
Huston Smith
#77. Just as a man carrying on his head a load of wood that has caught fire would go rushing to a pond to quench the flames, even so will the seeker of truth, scorched by the fires of life - birth, death, self-deluding futility - go rushing to a teacher wise to the ways of the things that matter most.
Huston Smith
#78. It must have been providence that directed Joel Morwood to dig in the right place, for he struck a lode of pure gold, as wide (comprehensive) as it is deep (profound). What he mined from that lode is a spiritual treasure.
Huston Smith
#79. But with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'.
Huston Smith
#80. Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.
Huston Smith
#81. You can never get enough of what you don't really want.
Huston Smith
#82. God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
Huston Smith
#83. Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.
Huston Smith
#84. Reserved as he [Confucius] was about the supernatural, he was not without it; somewhere in the universe there was a power that was on the side of right.
Huston Smith
#85. The Chinese began with the assumption that the group is the fundamental unit of reality. Individuals? Sure, we can factor them out from their groups, but let us not think that they as individuals have any viability apart from their group.
Huston Smith
#86. In order to live man must believe in that for which he lives.
Huston Smith
#87. Like a magnetic compass turning north, I always tried to head in the direction of the better, which is the direction to God ... the directions that appeared to lead away from Christianity led me deeper into it.
Huston Smith
#88. The faith I was born into formed me. I come from a missionary family - I grew up in China - and in my case, my religious upbringing was positive. Of course, not everyone has this experience. I know many of my students are what I have come to think of as wounded Christians or wounded Jews.
Huston Smith
#89. We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.
Huston Smith
#90. Historical figures lose their center when they become anxious over the outcome of their actions.
Huston Smith
#91. And it was from a Hindu, Swami Satprakashananda with his Christmas talks on "Jesus Christ, the Son of God," that I received the strongest confirmation - by an outside examiner, as it were - of Jesus's divine nature.
Huston Smith
#92. Not only is the destiny of the individual bound up with the entire Church; it is responsible for helping to sanctify the entire world of nature and history.
Huston Smith
#93. If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi's poetry is really remarkable.
Huston Smith
#94. Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.
Huston Smith
#95. First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat.
Huston Smith
#96. sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse, A difficult path is this - the poets declare!2 Science
Huston Smith
#97. The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.
Huston Smith
#98. The single destination of sanctity could admit of so many different avenues leading to it.
Huston Smith
#99. I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That is not true. And I think I may have introduced a word which has now caught on quite a bit, scientism. Science is good. It simply reports a discovery.
Huston Smith
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