Huston Smith QUOTES

61 " A nation can assume that the phrase “under God” in its Pledge of Allegiance shows that its citizens believe in God when all it really shows is that they believe in believing in God. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

62 " Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago. Students now face a plethora of compartmentalized fields of knowledge. Uninstructed as to how they connect, students are given no sense of the whole, if indeed their instructors think a seamless fabric of knowledge exists. "

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

63 " The Infinite discloses itself, as much of itself as our finite minds can comprehend, by building the universal grammars of language and religion into our brains. We did not create those grammars; they were bequeathed to us. "

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

64 " The Transcendent was my morning meal, we had the Eternal at lunch, and I ate a slice of the Infinite at dinner. "

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

65 " He is admitting that he is trapped, which realization leads to his desperate cry that we have already quoted, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 14:24). In whatever words it is the cry that every alcoholic has repeated. If there is to be a liberation, it will have to come from without, or better, from above: a higher power. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

66 " Religiously conceived, the human opportunity is to transform flashes of illumination into abiding light. "

― Huston Smith , Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals

67 " that there is no reason he should grieve. He will perhaps say it was too early for me to leave for the forest. But even if affection should prevent me from leaving my family just now of my own accord, in due course death would tear us apart, and in that we would have no say. Birds settle on a tree for a while, and then go their separate ways again. The meeting of all living beings must likewise inevitably end in their parting. This world passes away and disappoints the hopes of everlasting attachment. It is therefore unwise to have a sense of ownership for people who are united with us as in a dream—for a short while only and not in fact.3 "

― Huston Smith , Buddhism: A Concise Introduction

68 " The only thing that is unqualifiedly good is extended vision, the enlargement of one’s understanding of the ultimate nature of things. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

69 " Just as a man carrying on his head a load of wood that has caught fire would go rushing to a pond to quench the flames, even so will the seeker of truth, scorched by the fires of life—birth, death, self-deluding futility—go rushing to a teacher wise to the ways of the things that matter most. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

70 " Do not seek after truth. Merely cease to hold opinions. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

71 " There are worse kinds of infidelity than the sexual. I was living with one of the most interesting women in the world, and too often my attention was elsewhere. "

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

72 " After all our time living together, my identity is not self-contained: I am the way I am because she is the way she is. This “marriage of true minds” Shakespeare spoke of does not occur at the wedding nuptials but after sixty-five years of wedlock we may be getting there. "

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

73 " Building upon this early conception of the Church, Christians came to think of it as having a double aspect. Insofar as it consists of Christ and the Holy Spirit dwelling in people and suffusing them with grace and love, it is perfect. Insofar as it consists of fallible human members, it always falls short of perfection.9 The worldly face of the Church is always open to criticism. But its mistakes, Christians hold, have been due to the human material through which it works. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

74 " I had not yet gotten around to the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s Consilience. When I did read it, I discovered on page 286 that people follow religion because it is “easier” than empiricism. That struck a nerve, and provoked a response I shall be candid enough to report. Mr. Wilson: When you have endured an eight-day O-sesshin in a Zen monastery, sitting cross-legged and motionless for twelve hours a day and allowed only three and one-half hours of sleep each night until sleep and dream deprivation bring on a temporary psychosis (my own nondescript self); When you have attended four “rains retreats” at the Insight Buddhist Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts, for a total of one complete year of no reading, no writing, no speaking, and eyes always downcast (my wife); When you have almost died from the austerities you underwent before you attained enlightenment under a bo tree in India; When you have been crucified on Golgatha; When you have been thrown to lions in the Roman coliseum; When you have been in a concentration camp and held on to some measure of dignity through your faith; When you have given your life to providing a dignified death for homeless, destitute women gathered from the streets of Calcutta (Mother Teresa), or played out her counterpart with the poor in New York City (Dorothy Day); When, Mr. Wilson, you have undergone any one of these trials, it will then be time to talk about the ease of religion as compared with the ardors of empiricism. "

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

75 " Religion arose out of celebration and its opposite, bereavement, both of which cry out for collective expression. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

76 " We live in a fantastic century. I brush aside the incredible discoveries of science, and the razor’s edge between doom and fulfillment onto which they have pushed us, to speak of the new situation among peoples. Lands across the planet have become our neighbors, China across the street, the Middle East at our back door. Young people with backpacks are everywhere, and those who remain at home are treated to an endless parade of books, documentaries, and visitors from abroad. We hear that East and West are meeting, but it is an understatement. They are being flung at one another, hurled with the force of atoms, the speed of jets, the restlessness of minds impatient to learn the ways of others. 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. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

77 " We should witness all things non-reactively, especially our moods and emotions, neither condemning some nor holding on to others. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

78 " For what is a human being? A body? Certainly, but anything else? A personality that includes mind, memories, and propensities that have derived from unique trajectory of life experiences? This, too, but anything more? Some say no, but Hinduism disagrees. Underlying the human self and animating it is a reservoir of being that never dies, is never exhausted, and is unrestricted in consciousness and bliss. The infinite center of life, this hidden self, or Atman, is no less than Brahman, the Godhead. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

79 " These are what people really want, and they want them infinitely. To state the full truth, then, we must say that what people really would like to have is infinite being, infinite knowledge, and infinite bliss. Moksha is the release from the finitude that restricts us from the limitless being, consciousness, and bliss we desire. "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions

80 " What if the interests of the self were expanded to the point of approximating a God’s eye view of humanity? Seeing all things under the aspect of eternity would make one objective toward oneself, accepting failure as on a par with success in the stupendous human drama of yes and no, positive and negative, push and pull. Personal failure would be as small a cause for concerns as playing a loser in a summer theater performance. How could one feel disappointed in one’s own defeat if one experienced the victor’s joy as also one’s own; if one’s competitor’s success was enjoyed vicariously? Instead of crying impossible, we should perhaps content ourselves with noting how different this would feel from life as it is usually lived, for reports of the greatest spiritual geniuses suggest they rose to something like this perspective "

― Huston Smith , The World's Religions