Huston Smith Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.

  Huston Smith

  Jesus, Defined, Confined

  "Huston Smith's painful spiritual odyssey" by John Blake, edition.cnn.com. November 23, 2009.

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• Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts calls the “skin-encapsulated ego.” Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth.

  Huston Smith

  Moving, Love Is, Self

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Law, Essence

  "The World of Religion According to Huston Smith". Interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, www.motherjones.com. November/December 1997.

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• 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.

  Huston Smith

  Healing, Government, Association

  "The World of Religion According to Huston Smith". Interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, www.motherjones.com. November 1997.

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• Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.

  Huston Smith

  Spiritual, Godly, Makeup

  Huston Smith (2009). “Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• 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

  Reflection, Knowing, Mind

  Huston Smith, Jeffery Paine (2012). “The Huston Smith Reader”, p.43, Univ of California Press

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• ...primal people see the objects of this world not (or not only) as solid but as open windows to their divine source.

  Huston Smith

  People, World, Window

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• 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

  Plato, Reflection, Ordinary

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• 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

  Christianity, Made, Found

  "The World of Religion According to Huston Smith". Interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, www.motherjones.com. November, 1997.

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• Historically, religion has given people another world to live in, a world more adaptive to the human spirit. As a student of world religions, I see religion as the winnower of the wisdom of the human race. Of course, not everything about these religions is wise. Their social patterns, for example - master-slave, caste, and gender relations - have been adopted from the mores of their time. But in their view of the nature of reality, there is nothing in either modernity or postmodernity that rivals them.

  Huston Smith

  Wise, Reality, People

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• 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

  Jesus, Thinking, Way

  "Huston Smith: Rock star of religions turns 90" by Heidi Benson, www.sfgate.com. May 21, 2009.

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• 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God' suggested to me a heavenly welfare program for the meek. Today that saying reveals an astute insight into egotism, about how those with swollen pride or vanity cannot see anything larger than themselves.

  Huston Smith

  Blessed, Pride, Welfare Programs

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• Only while they are conforming their actions to the model of some archetypal hero do the Arunta feel that they are truly alive, for in those roles they are immortal. The occasions on which they slip from such molds are quite meaningless, for time immediately devours those occasions and reduces them to nothingness.

  Huston Smith

  Hero, Mold, Roles

  "The World's Religions". Book by Huston Smith, 1991.

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• 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

  Spiritual, Thinking, Eight

  "Huston Smith: Rock star of religions turns 90" by Heidi Benson, www.sfgate.com. May 21, 2009.

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• 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

  Eight, Years, Profound

  "FINDING MY RELIGION / Religious scholar Huston Smith talks about Christianity and why religion matters today" by David Ian Miller, www.sfgate.com. September 19, 2005.

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• I don't want to justify religion in terms of its benefits to us. I believe that, on balance, it does a lot of bad things, too - a tremendous amount. But I don't think that the final justification of religion is the good it does for people. I think the final justification is that it's true, and truth takes priority over consequences. Religion helps us deal with what is most important to the human spirit: values, meaning, purpose, and quality.

  Huston Smith

  Believe, Thinking, People

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• 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. What came through to them was dogmatism and moralism, and it rubbed them the wrong way.

  Huston Smith

  Christian, Religious, Thinking

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• The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world.

  Huston Smith

  Art, World, Great Work

  Huston Smith, Jeffery Paine (2012). “The Huston Smith Reader”, p.77, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Memories, Vision, Awakening

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• 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

  Eras, Allies, Spirit

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• God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.

  Huston Smith

  God, Creative, Interchange

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• Seen through the eyes of faith, religion's future is secure. As long as there are human beings, there will be religion for the sufficient reason that the self is a theomorphic creature - one whose morphe (form) is theos - God encased within it. Having been created in the imago Dei, the image God, all human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them.

  Huston Smith

  Heart, Eye, Faith Religion

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• ...the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action.

  Huston Smith

  Our Actions, Action, Consequences Of Our Actions

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• What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.

  Huston Smith

  Sickness, Distraction

  "Remembering Huston Smith, Noted 'World's Religions' Scholar". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, wvik.org. January 4, 2017.

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• 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

  Religious, Attitude, Taken

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