“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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "They saw lives that had been transformed--men and women who were ordinary in every way except for the fact that they se…" by Huston Smith?

Huston Smith29

Religious studies scholar 1919–2016

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.53

“The game of power is played remorselessly by men who have not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, the way ordinary people live, and the ordinary people are too terrified to protest.”

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer

A Vision of the Uncorrupted Society, p. 279 (See also: Niccolò Machiavelli..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

“For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“There are 25 differences in the way women and men behave in the workplace. These 25 differences lead to men receiving higher pay and women having better lives—or at least more balanced lives.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. xvii.

“The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them – or wished to see them.... No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life.”

Elizabeth Bisland Whetmore (1861–1929) American writer and journalist

On men and women, A Candle of Understanding.

“Her mother had once told her that there were men who kept secrets bottled up inside and that it spelled trouble for the women who loved them.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Denise Holton, Chapter 21, p. 231
2000s, The Rescue (2000)

“We want parents and teachers to regularly have conversations with young men and women about God’s plan for their lives. These should be ordinary conversations; otherwise, when the topic of vocations comes up, it seems like something arcane, unfamiliar, or mysterious.”

Paul Stagg Coakley (1955) Catholic archbishop

Oklahoma City’s archbishop on Satanists, vocations, and a unique canonization case https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2016/09/19/oklahoma-citys-archbishop-on-satanists-vocations-and-a-unique-canonization-case/ (September 19, 2016)