Quotes from book
The World's Religions

Name: The World's Religions
Author: Huston Smith

The World's Religions, originally titled The Religions of Man, is a book written by religious studies scholar Huston Smith. The book was first published in 1958 and has been translated into twelve languages; it is "one of the most widely used college textbooks on comparative religion."

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

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

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)

“What are the ingredients of the most creatively meaningful image of human existence that the mind can conceive? Remove human frailty--as grass, as a sigh, as dust, as moth-crushed--and the estimate becomes romantic. Remove grandeur--a little lower than God--and aspiration recedes. Remove sin-the tendency to miss the mark--and sentimentality threatens. Remove freedom--choose ye this day!--and responsibility goes by the board. Remove, finally, divine parentage and life becomes estranged, cut loose and adrift on a cold, indifferent sea. With all that has been discovered about human life in the intervening 2,500 years, it is difficult to find a flaw in this assessment.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

On the Torah's take on human existence.
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)

“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 book The World's Religions

Discussing the beliefs of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
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)

“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)

“Taoist yogis sought to harness the Tao directly, drawing it first into their own heart-minds and then beaming it to others. Yogis who managed this feat would for the most part be unnoticed, but their life-giving enterprise did more for the community than the works of other benefactors.”

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)

“[…] 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)

“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 book The World's Religions

Arguing that Confucianism ought to be considered a religion and not a 'moralistic rationalism.'
The World's Religions (1991)

“We are a blend of dust and divinity.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

Summarizing the Jewish view of human nature.
The World's Religions (1991)

“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)

“Mystics of every faith report contacts with a world that startles and transforms them with its dazzling darkness. Zen stands squarely in this camp, its only uniqueness being that it makes breaking the language barrier its central concern.”

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.