Top 100 Huston Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Huston Smith

2. “What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.”

— Huston Smith

3. “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

4. “Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

6. “The most powerful moral influence is example.”

— Huston Smith

7. “All -isms end up in schisms.”

— Huston Smith

8. “We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.”

— Huston Smith

9. “Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us.”

— Huston Smith

10. “We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.”

— Huston Smith

11. “The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

13. “We are a blend of dust and divinity.”

— Huston Smith

14. “If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.”

— Huston Smith

15. “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

16. “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. Its the same in religion.”

— Huston Smith

17. “God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.”

— Huston Smith

18. “Practice giving things away, not just things you don’t care about, but things you do like.”

— Huston Smith

19. “I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.”

— Huston Smith

20. “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.”

— Huston Smith

21. “Walnuts have a shell, and they have a kernel. Religions are the same. They have an essence, but then they have a protective coating. This is not the only way to put it. But it’s my way. So the kernels are the same. However, the shells are different.”

— Huston Smith

22. “Oliver Wendell Holmes’s way of establishing parity is appealing: “Science gives us major answers to minor questions, while religion gives us minor answers to major questions.”

— Huston Smith

23. “When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most, not for space travel or the release of nuclear energy, but as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take one another seriously.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

25. “The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire – by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.”

— Huston Smith

26. “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.”

— Huston Smith

27. “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.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

30. “To try to extinguish the drive for riches with money is like trying to quench a fire by pouring butter over it.”

— Huston Smith

31. “We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.”

— Huston Smith

32. “The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

35. “Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.”

— Huston Smith

36. “Detachment from the finite self or attachment to the whole of things – we can state the phenomenon either positively or negatively. When it occurs, life is lifted above the possibility of frustration and above ennui – the third threat to joy – as well, for the cosmic drama is too spectacular to permit boredom in the face of such vivid identification.”

— Huston Smith

37. “If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable.”

— Huston Smith

38. “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.”

— Huston Smith

39. “Religion is the call to confront reality; to master the self.”

— Huston Smith

40. “I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life the way God would have acted if God had assumed human form.”

— Huston Smith

41. “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.”

— Huston Smith

42. “A great anatomist used to close his opening lecture to beginning medical students with words that apply equally to our own undertaking. “In this course,” he would say, “we shall be dealing with flesh and bones and cells and sinews, and there are going to be times when it’s all going to seem terribly cold-blooded. But never forget. It’s alive!” II.”

— Huston Smith

43. “It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.”

— Huston Smith

44. “Heaven and earth are my inner and outer coffins. The sun, moon, and stars are my drapery, and the whole creation my funeral procession. What more do I want?”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

46. “Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and instead to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they encounter in the natural world.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

48. “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

49. “Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won’t waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection.”

— Huston Smith

50. “Human intelligence is a reflection of the intelligence that produces everything. In knowing, we are simply extending the intelligence that comes to and constitutes us. We mimic the mind of God, so to speak. Or better, we continue and extend it.”

— Huston Smith