Huston Smith quotes - page 3

The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned. (Huston Smith)
We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn. View quote
Huston Smith
It would be good if we bore one another's burdens. View quote
Huston Smith
The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience. View quote
Huston Smith
Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. View quote
Huston Smith
The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm. View quote
Huston Smith
In order to live man must believe in that for which he lives. View quote
Huston Smith
Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection. View quote
Huston Smith
Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home. (Huston Smith)
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. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
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. View quote
Huston Smith
What is distinctive in Hinduism is the amount of attention it has devoted to identifying basic spiritual personality types and the disciplines that are most likely to work for each. The result is a recognition, pervading the entire religion, that there are multiple paths to God, each calling for its distinctive mode of travel. View quote
Huston Smith
Looking at the difference between pre- and post-Islamic Arabia, we are forced to ask whether history has ever witnessed a comparable moral advance among so many people in so short a time. View quote
Huston Smith
Taoist yogis sought to harness the Tao directly, drawing it first into their own heart-minds and then beaming it to others. Yogis who managed this feat would for the most part be unnoticed, but their life-giving enterprise did more for the community than the works of other benefactors. View quote
Huston Smith
Primal time is atemporal; an eternal now. To speak of atemporal or timeless time is paradoxical, but the paradox can be relieved if we see that primal time focuses on causal rather than chronological sequence; for primal peoples, "past" means preeminently closer to the originating Source of things. That the Source precedes the present is of secondary importance. View quote
Huston Smith
[...] if we were to find ourselves with a single religion tomorrow, it is likely that there would be two the day after. (Huston Smith)
Mystics of every faith report contacts with a world that startles and transforms them with its dazzling darkness. Zen stands squarely in this camp, its only uniqueness being that it makes breaking the language barrier its central concern. View quote
Huston Smith
They [Taoists] were fond of pointing out that the value of cups, windows, and doorways lies in the part of them that are not there. View quote
Huston Smith
Confucius saw the human self as a node, not an entity. View quote
Huston Smith
The sheer immensity of the human self as envisioned by the world's religions is awesome. View quote
Huston Smith