Quotes from Huston Smith

In order to live man must believe in that for which he lives.

In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.

Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home.

God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.

It would be good if we bore one another's burdens.

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

God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.

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.

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

Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?

Religion is the call to confront reality; to master the self.

The most powerful moral influence is example.

The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies.

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

It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.

First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat.

As known unknowns become known; unknown unknowns proliferate; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

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

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.

Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.

In the post-individualistic era, science and spirituality will become allies, and human beings will realize a vast potentiality now only dimly felt.

The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.

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.

Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.