Huston Smith Quotes

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Huston Smith

Profession : Theologian

Birth : May 31, 1919

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

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

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

God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.

Huston Smith

I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That is not true. And I think I may have introduced a word which has now caught on quite a bit, scientism. Science is good. It simply reports a discovery.

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

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

Whether things turn out for the better depends on what we do. We ought not spend our time masterminding the future, but recognize our marching orders: to do the best we can for history and the planet.

Huston Smith

I grew up taking it for granted that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be.

Huston Smith

In my town, I had only one adult American male role model: my father. I grew up taking it for granted that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be.

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

The notion that Western religions are more rigid than those of Asia is overdrawn. Ours is the most permissive society history has ever known - almost the only thing that is forbidden now is to forbid - and Asian teachers and their progeny play up to this propensity by soft-pedaling Hinduism's, Buddhism's, Sufism's rules.

Huston Smith

Science is like a flashlight in the hands of people living in a huge balloon. They can illuminate anything in the balloon, but cannot shine it outside the balloon to see where it is floating - or if it is floating at all.

Huston Smith

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

Huston Smith

The most powerful moral influence is example.

Huston Smith

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.

Huston Smith

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. It's the same in religion.

Huston Smith

The New Age movement looks like a mixed bag. I see much in it that seems good: It's optimistic; it's enthusiastic; it has the capacity for belief. On the debit side, I think one needs to distinguish between belief and credulity.

Huston Smith

There are wonderfully intrinsic moments when life makes sense, and doubts are banished as irrelevant in those moments. Of course, we can't stay in that state. We're not here to be blissed out all the time.

Huston Smith

The scientific method is nearly perfect for understanding the physical aspects of our life. But it is a radically limited viewfinder in its inability to offer values, morals and meanings that are at the center of our lives.

Huston Smith