Huston Smith QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine- the imago dei, image of god…And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case, love’s bombardment. The process begins in infancy, where a mother’s initially unilateral loving smile awakens love in her baby and as coordination develops, elicits its answering smile… A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules and threats. Love can only take root in children when it comes to them- initially and most importantly from nurturing parents. Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

3 " The disciples of Jesus “found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this (he) is how it would behave… he invited people to see differently instead of telling them what to do or believe…he located the authority of his teaching in his hearer’s hearts, not in himself or God-as-removed. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

4 " Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn. "

― Huston Smith , Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

5 " The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. "

― Huston Smith , Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization

6 " Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany. "

― Huston Smith

7 " Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light? "

― Huston Smith

8 " When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states. "

― Huston Smith , The Essential Rumi

9 " We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.

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― Huston Smith , Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

10 " Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, “the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

11 " Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for ‘art,’ because for Indians everything is art. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

12 " 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 , The World's Religions

13 " 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 , The World's Religions

14 " If I were asked under what sky the human mind…has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions to some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant—I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life…again I should point to India. Max Müller "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

15 " 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 , The World's Religions

16 " Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man’s success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. “Don’t worry,” he yawned. “I’ll tempt him to institutionalize it.” That "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

17 " To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life’s final and fascinating challenge. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

18 " The game can be won or lost, but not the player himself. If he has worked hard, he has improved his game and indeed his faculties; this happens in defeat fully as much as in victory. As the contestant is related to his total person, so is the finite self of any particular lifetime related to its underlying Atman. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

19 " If I were asked under what sky the human mind…has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions to some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant—I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life…again I should point to India. Max Müller On "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

20 " No individual is solely reflective, emotional, active, or experimental, and different life situations call for different resources to be brought into play. Most people will, on the whole, find travel on one road more satisfactory than on others and will consequently tend to keep close to it; but Hinduism encourages people to test all four and combine them as best suits their needs. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

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