94+ Huston Smith Quotes On Education, Religion And Bible

Huston Smith was an American Theologian best known for his book The World's Religions. He was a scholar of comparative religion and a proponent of the idea that all religions share a common core. His works sought to bridge the gaps between different faiths, and he was a major influence on the New Age Movement. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Huston Smith on leadership, education, religion.

Top 10 Huston Smith Quotes

1. The most powerful moral influence is example.
2. I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.
3. All -isms end up in schisms.
4. The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.
5. At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome.
6. Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
7. ...primal people see the objects of this world not (or not only) as solid but as open windows to their divine source.
8. We are a blend of dust and divinity.
9. 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.
10. God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.

Huston Smith Image Quotes

I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience. — Huston Smith

Huston Smith Short Quotes

• In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.
• ...the single destination of sanctity could admit of so many different avenues leading to it.
• When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states.
• Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.
• ...the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action.
• Religion is the call to confront reality; to master the self.
• What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.
• It would be good if we bore one another's burdens.
• I grew up taking it for granted that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be.
• In order to live man must believe in that for which he lives.

Huston Smith Quotes About Religion

God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. You can express the same thought, but to different people you have to use a different language. Its the same in religion. — Huston Smith

Walnuts have a shell, and they have a kernel. Religions are the same. They have an essence, but then they have a protective coating. This is not the only way to put it. But it's my way. So the kernels are the same. However, the shells are different. — Huston Smith

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

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

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. — Huston Smith

...conversation can be as mutually incomprehensible as foreign languages. We need the different and complementary perspectives of the various yogas - and ideally of all religions - not only to reach God but to reach each other. — Huston Smith

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

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

It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations. — Huston Smith

The modern period adds social ethics to religions agenda, for we now realize that social structures are not like laws of nature. They are human creations, so we are responsible for them. — Huston Smith

Huston Smith Quotes About Life

If human life is to survive on this planet, the old dualistic worldview, with people on one side and the environment on the other, must yield to a new vision that connects us with everything else and leads us to care for and take responsibility for it. — Huston Smith

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

The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits — Huston Smith

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

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

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

Huston Smith Quotes About Faithful

One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else. — Huston Smith

The faith I was born into formed me. — Huston Smith

I have a body and I have a soul. And my body belongs to the faith - in fact, the church - into which it was born, the Methodist Church. — Huston Smith

Huston Smith Famous Quotes And Sayings

I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience. — Huston Smith

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

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 — Huston Smith

'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

What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future. — Huston Smith

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

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

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. — Huston Smith

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them. — Huston Smith

We become compassionate not from altruism which denies the self for the sake of the other, but from the insight that sees and feels one is the other. — Huston Smith

...like a magnetic compass turning north, I always tried to head in the direction of the better, which is the direction to God. ...the directions that appeared to lead away from Christianity led me deeper into it. — Huston Smith

Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us. — Huston Smith

Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake. — Huston Smith

So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues. — Huston Smith

A religion made up solely of heightened religious experiences would not be a religion at all. ...The major religious traditions address the mysteries (with or without entheogens), but they have other business to do: widen understanding, give meaning, provide solace, promote loving-kindness, and connect human being to human being. — Huston Smith

Not only is the destiny of the individual bound up with the entire Church; it is responsible for helping to sanctify the entire world of nature and history. — Huston Smith

I simply wanted to experience the presence of this man who had revolutionized my understanding. After a while we sat in silence, gazing at the barren canyon walls. And the mute desert seemed to carry on our conversation for us. — Huston Smith

The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned. — Huston Smith

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

My body was born into the - baptized in the Methodist church, and it will be buried in the Methodist Church. Meanwhile, I have a soul. And my soul cannot be confined to any human institution. — Huston Smith

Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province. — Huston Smith

I had assumed that Bush's seemingly inflexible policy to support Sharon was for political reasons of his getting elected. But as to whether he really believes his actions are going to hasten the day of the final conflict, I do not know. — Huston Smith

As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves. — Huston Smith

The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience. — Huston Smith

The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm. — Huston Smith

It remained for the twentieth century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, 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, it is sometimes called. And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case love's bombardment — Huston Smith

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn. — Huston Smith

Reserved as he [Confucius] was about the supernatural, he was not without it; somewhere in the universe there was a power that was on the side of right. — Huston Smith

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

Modern science agrees that the universe consists of vibrations, but sound is more than vibration. Distinct from white noise, sound is vibrations in harmonic proportions, and from the billions of vibrations that are possible, the universe shows a startling, overwhelming preference for the few thousand that make harmonic sense.This is because the One, from which all things issue, is beautiful. — Huston Smith

Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home. — Huston Smith

Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us. — Huston Smith

Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection. — Huston Smith

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

I think it matters almost infinitely that we practice one of the authentic religions. But if you mean does it make any difference which. The answer is no, as long as each is followed with equal intensity, sincerity, dedication. — Huston Smith

We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed. — Huston Smith

Religion teaches us that our lives here on earth are to be used for transformation. — Huston Smith

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

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

Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times. — Huston Smith

Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany. — Huston Smith

...but with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'. — Huston Smith

As known unknowns become known; unknown unknowns proliferate; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. — Huston Smith

We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery. — 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. — Huston Smith

God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus. — Huston Smith

In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes. — Huston Smith

The word translated, koan, it means a problem. But it's a very special problem. And to strip it down to the way it works, you are given a problem which has no rational solution. There is a contradiction built into it. One standard - one is this is the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping? And so on. All right, so the first thing is that it brings your rational mind to an impasse. — Huston Smith

It must have been providence that directed Joel Morwood to dig in the right place, for he struck a lode of pure gold, as wide (comprehensive) as it is deep (profound). What he mined from that lode is a spiritual treasure. — Huston Smith

It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry. — Huston Smith

If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable. — Huston Smith

If you are drilling for water, it's better to drill one 60-foot well than 10 6-foot wells. — Huston Smith

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them. — Huston Smith

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

Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. — Huston Smith

It's often difficult for us to act compassionately, but sacred art eases the difficulty by ennobling us. — Huston Smith

Life Lessons by Huston Smith

1. Huston Smith taught that life is a journey of spiritual growth and self-discovery. He believed that we should strive to cultivate our inner life, and to develop a deep understanding of our own spiritual nature.
2. He also believed that the love of God should be the center of our lives, and that we should strive to live in harmony with the divine will.
3. Finally, Smith taught that we should be open to learning from all of the world's spiritual traditions, and that we should strive to live in a way that is respectful of all of humanity.