Huston Smith > Quotes

“Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size of a gift, it is its quality and the amount of mental attachment you overcome that count. So don't bankrupt yourself on a momentary positive impulse, only to regret it later. Give thought to giving. Give small things, carefully, and observe the mental processes going along with the act of releasing the little thing you liked. (53)
(Quote is actually Robert A F Thurman but Huston Smith, who only wrote the introduction to my edition, seems to be given full credit for this text.)”
― Huston Smith, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Liberation Through Understanding the Between

“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

“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

“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”
― Huston Smith, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Liberation Through Understanding the Between

“Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?”
― Huston Smith

“If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race. ”
― Huston Smith

“When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states.”
― Huston Smith, The Essential Rumi

“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

“All -isms end up in schisms.”
― Huston Smith

“We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.


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

“You can never get enough of what you don't really want.”
― 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. — Mother Jones November/December 1997.”
― Huston Smith

“What a strange fellowship this is, the God seekers in every land, lifting their voices in the most disparate ways imaginable to the God of all life. How does it sound from above? Like bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange ethereal harmony? Does one faith carry the lead or do the parts share in counterpoint and antiphony where not in full throated chorus?

We cannot know. All we can do is to listen carefully and with full attention to each voice in turn as it addresses the divine.”
― Huston Smith, The World's Religions

“You can’t understand anything unless you unless you understand everything.”
― Huston Smith

“Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for ‘art,’ because for Indians everything is art.”
― Huston Smith, The World's Religions, Revised and Updated

“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

“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, Revised and Updated

“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

“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, Revised and Updated

“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, Revised and Updated

“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

“Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history.”
― Huston Smith

“Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and instead to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they encounter in the natural world.”
― Huston Smith, The World's Religions, Revised and Updated

“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

“The obvious veneration felt by almost all who knew him is contagious, and the reader is soon caught up with his disciples in the sense of being in the presence of something close to wisdom incarnate. Perhaps the most striking thing about him was his combination of a cool head and a warm heart, a blend that shielded him from sentimentality, on the one hand, and indifference, on the other. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest rationalists of all times, resembling in this respect no one as much as Socrates.”
― Huston Smith, Buddhism: A Concise Introduction

“There is within us—in even the blithest, most lighthearted among us—a fundamental dis-ease. It acts like an unquenchable fire that renders the vast majority of us incapable in this life of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies in the marrow of our bones and the deep regions of our souls. All great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion tries to name and analyze this longing. We are seldom in direct touch with it, and indeed the modern world seems set on preventing us from getting in touch with it by covering it with an unending phantasmagoria of entertainments, obsessions, addictions, and distractions of every sort. But the longing is there, built into us like a jack-in-the-box that presses for release. Two great paintings suggest this longing in their titles—Gauguin’s Who Are We? Where Did We Come From? Where Are We Going? and de Chirico’s Nostalgia for the Infinite—but I must work with words. Whether we realize it or not, simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence, with its confining walls of finitude and mortality.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“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, Revised and Updated

“To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life’s final and fascinating challenge.”
― Huston Smith, The World's Religions, Revised and Updated

“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, Revised and Updated

“Some friends accused me of whoring after the Infinite. Well, what better whoredom is there?”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography