Huston Smith Quotes
If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.
We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.
The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.
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.
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.
Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.
...primal people see the objects of this world not (or not only) as solid but as open windows to their divine source.
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.
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.
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.
When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade.
I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life the way God would have acted if God had assumed human form.
As known unknowns become known; unknown unknowns proliferate; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
We become compassionate not from altruism which denies the self for the sake of the other, but from the insight that sees and feels one is the other.
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.
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.
In the post-individualistic era, science and spirituality will become allies, and human beings will realize a vast potentiality now only dimly felt.
If you are drilling for water, it's better to drill one 60-foot well than 10 6-foot wells.
...the single destination of sanctity could admit of so many different avenues leading to it.
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.
Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.
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.
When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states.
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.
As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves.
The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.
It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
![Huston Smith Quotes: "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."](https://www.quoteslyfe.com/images/collection3/quotations662/Reserved-as-he-Confucius-was-about-the-662120.jpg)
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.
The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.
The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world.
Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake.
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.
What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.
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.
My body was born into the - baptized in the Methodist church, and it will be buried in the Methodist Church. Meanwhile, I have a soul. And my soul cannot be confined to any human institution.
...but with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'.
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
