Quotes from Huston Smith

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.

The faith I was born into formed me.

I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions, and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find, and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.

Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts calls the "skin-encapsulated ego." Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth.

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

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

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

If we take the world's enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.

When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states.

We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.

All -isms end up in schisms.

You can never get enough of what you don't really want.

Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality. — Mother Jones November/December 1997.

What a strange fellowship this is, the God seekers in every land, lifting their voices in the most disparate ways imaginable to the God of all life. How does it sound from above? Like bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange ethereal harmony? Does one faith carry the lead or do the parts share in counterpoint and antiphony where not in full throated chorus? We cannot know. All we can do is to listen carefully and with full attention to each voice in turn as it addresses the divine.

You can't understand anything unless you unless you understand everything.

Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for 'art,' because for Indians everything is art.

Without attention, the human sense of wonder and the holy will stir occasionally, but to become a steady flame it must be tended.

If it is possible to be homesick for the world, even places one has never been and knows one will never see, this book is the child of such homesickness.

Science makes major contributions to minor needs, Justice Holmes was fond of saying, adding that religion, however small its successes, is at least at work on the things that matter most.

The disciples of Jesus "found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this (he) is how it would behave… he invited people to see differently instead of telling them what to do or believe…he located the authority of his teaching in his hearer's hearts, not in himself or God-as-removed.

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history.

Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man's success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. "Don't worry," he yawned. "I'll tempt him to institutionalize it." That

To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life's final and fascinating challenge.