Huston Smith Quotes (29 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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The World's Religions

Huston Smith

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Famous Huston Smith Quotes

“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

Source: Tibetan Book of the Dead

“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.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

Part of this quote may actually be by Ralph Washington Sockman.
The World's Religions (1991)
Source: Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization
Context: 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.

“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 book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

“Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions.(1991)
The World's Religions (1991)

“A second arresting feature of Jesus' language was its invitational style. Instead of telling people what to do or what to believe, he invited them to see things differently, confident that if they did so their behaviour would change accordingly. This called for working with peoples' imaginations more than with their reason or their will.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

“Primal time is atemporal; an eternal now. To speak of atemporal or timeless time is paradoxical, but the paradox can be relieved if we see that primal time focuses on causal rather than chronological sequence; for primal peoples, "past" means preeminently closer to the originating Source of things. That the Source precedes the present is of secondary importance.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

Huston Smith Quotes about religion

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

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

“What is distinctive in Hinduism is the amount of attention it has devoted to identifying basic spiritual personality types and the disciplines that are most likely to work for each. The result is a recognition, pervading the entire religion, that there are multiple paths to God, each calling for its distinctive mode of travel.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

“What a curious portrait this is for the supposed founder of a religion. The Old Boy didn't preach. He didn't organize or promote. He wrote a few pages on request, rode off on a water buffalo, and that was it was far as he was concerned.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

On Lao-Tzu, the legendary author of the Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism.
The World's Religions (1991)

“Traditionally, every Chinese was Confucian in ethics and public life, Taoist in private life and hygiene, and Buddhist at the time of death, with a healthy dash of shamanistic folk religion thrown in along the way. As someone has put the point: Every Chinese wears a Confucian hat, Taoist robes, and Buddhist sandals. In Japan Shinto was added to the mix.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

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

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

“The religions begin by assuring us that if we could see the full picture we would find it more integrated than we would normally suppose.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)
Context: The religions begin by assuring us that if we could see the full picture we would find it more integrated than we would normally suppose. Life gives us no view of the whole. [... ] It is as if life were a great tapestry, which we face from its wrong side. This gives it the appearance of a maze of knots and threads, which for the most part appear chaotic.
From a purely human standpoint the wisdom traditions are the species' most prolonged and serious attempts to infer from the maze on this side of the tapestry the pattern which, on its right side, gives meaning to the whole. As the beauty and harmony of the design derive from the way its parts are related, the design confers on these parts a significance that we, seeing only scraps of the design, do not normally perceive.

Huston Smith Quotes about time

“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 book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

“What made him outlive his time and place was the way he used the Spirit that coursed though him not just to heal individuals but -- this was his aspiration -- to heal humanity, beginning with his own people.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)
Context: He [Jesus] could have been that [a healer and exorcist]--indeed, he could have been "the most extraordinary figure in … the stream of Jewish charismatic healers," as the same New Testament scholar goes on to say--without attracting more than local attention. What made him outlive his time and place was the way he used the Spirit that coursed though him not just to heal individuals but -- this was his aspiration -- to heal humanity, beginning with his own people.

“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 book The World's Religions

On Australian indigenous spirituality.
The World's Religions (1991)

Huston Smith Quotes

“Idealists may call for the exercise of heroic continence in such circumstances, but heroism is never a mass option.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

On polygyny is Islam.
The World's Religions (1991)
Context: There are circumstances in the imperfect condition we know as human existence when polygyny is morally preferable to its alternative. Individually, such a condition might arise if, early in the marriage, the wife were to contract paralysis or another disability that would prevent sexual union. Collectively, a war that decimated the male population could provide an example, forcing (as this would) the option between polygyny and depriving a large population of women of motherhood and a nuclear family of any sort. Idealists may call for the exercise of heroic continence in such circumstances, but heroism is never a mass option.

Exercises

“All human thought proceeds through words, so if words are askew, thought cannot proceed aright.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

On Confucian values.
The World's Religions (1991)
Context: All human thought proceeds through words, so if words are askew, thought cannot proceed aright. When Confucius says that nothing is more important than that a father be a father, that a ruler be a ruler, he is saying that we must know what we mean when we use those words. But equally important, the words must mean the right things. Rectification of Names is the call for a normative semantics--the creation of a language in which key nouns carry the meanings they should carry if life is to be well ordered.

“They saw lives that had been transformed--men and women who were ordinary in every way except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)
Context: The people who first heard Jesus' disciples proclaiming the Good News were as impressed by what they saw as by what they heard. They saw lives that had been transformed--men and women who were ordinary in every way except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living. They evinced a tranquility, simplicity, and cheerfulness that their hearers had nowhere else encountered. Here were people who seemed to be making a success of the enterprise everyone would like to succeed at--that of life itself.

Women , Men , Secret , Way

“Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)
Context: A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules, and threats. Love only takes 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.

Love

“No affirmation is more than a finger pointing to the moon.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)
Context: Signposts are not the destination, maps are not the terrain. Life is too rich and textured to be fitted into pigeonholes, let alone equated with them. No affirmation is more than a finger pointing to the moon. And, lest attention turn to the finger, Zen will point, only to withdraw its finger at once.

“The self is a center of relationships.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)
Context: The point is not merely that human relationships are fulfilling; the Confucian claim runs deeper than that. It is rather that apart from human relationships there is no self. The self is a center of relationships. It is constructed through its interactions with others and is defined by the sum of its social roles.

Happy

“From a purely human standpoint the wisdom traditions are the species' most prolonged and serious attempts to infer from the maze on this side of the tapestry the pattern which, on its right side, gives meaning to the whole.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

Wisdom

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

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)