Huston Smith quotes - page 2

Religion is the call to confront reality; to master the self. (Huston Smith)
I grew up taking it for granted that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
If we take the world's enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race. View quote
Huston Smith
We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
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)
All -isms end up in schisms. View quote
Huston Smith
Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province. View quote
Huston Smith
Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward. View quote
Huston Smith
God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just. View quote
Huston Smith
In the post-individualistic era, science and spirituality will become allies, and human beings will realize a vast potentiality now only dimly felt. View quote
Huston Smith
I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience. View quote
Huston Smith
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. (Huston Smith)
The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world. View quote
Huston Smith
It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves. View quote
Huston Smith