Huston Smith Short Quotes

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Confucius saw the human self as a node, not an entity.

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

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

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

Huston Smith
The sheer immensity of the human self as envisioned by the world's religions is awesome.

Huston Smith
The single destination of sanctity could admit of so many different avenues leading to it.

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

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

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

Huston Smith
[...] if we were to find ourselves with a single religion tomorrow, it is likely that there would be two the day after.

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

Huston Smith
They [Taoists] were fond of pointing out that the value of cups, windows, and doorways lies in the part of them that are not there.

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
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
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
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
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
Looking at the difference between pre- and post-Islamic Arabia, we are forced to ask whether history has ever witnessed a comparable moral advance among so many people in so short a time.

Huston Smith
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.

Huston Smith
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.

Huston Smith