Top 100 Huston Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

53. “The word “my” always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed; when I speak of my book or my jacket, I do not suppose that I am those things. But I also speak of my body, my mind, or my personality, giving evidence thereby that in some sense I consider myself as distinct from them as well. What is this “I” that possesses my body and mind, but is not their equivalent?”

— Huston Smith

54. “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

55. “Suffering led the Buddha to enlightenment, and it may cause us, against our will, to grow in compassion, awareness, and possibly eventually peace.”

— Huston Smith

56. “Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?”

— Huston Smith

57. “If human life is to survive on this planet, the old dualistic worldview, with people on one side and the environment on the other, must yield to a new vision that connects us with everything else and leads us to care for and take responsibility for it.”

— Huston Smith

58. “A nation can assume that the addition of the words “under God” to its pledge of allegiance gives evidence that its citizens actually believe in God whereas all it really proves is that they believe in “believing” in God.”

— Huston Smith

59. “The game can be won or lost, but not the player himself. If he has worked hard, he has improved his game and indeed his faculties; this happens in defeat fully as much as in victory. As the contestant is related to his total person, so is the finite self of any particular lifetime related to its underlying Atman.”

— Huston Smith

60. “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

61. “Do not seek after truth. Merely cease to hold opinions.”

— Huston Smith

62. “The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world.”

— Huston Smith

63. “Everything I do for my private wellbeing adds another layer to my ego, and in thickening it insulates me more from God. Conversely, every act done without thought for myself diminishes my self-centeredness until finally no barrier remains to separate me from the Divine. The.”

— Huston Smith

64. “Symbolism is the science of understanding the relations between the multiple levels of reality.”

— Huston Smith

65. “You can’t understand anything unless you unless you understand everything.”

— Huston Smith

66. “We are limited in joy, knowledge, and being, the three things people really want.”

— Huston Smith

67. “The point of the story is that the universe is one gigantic Wishing Tree, with branches that reach into every heart. The cosmic process decrees that sometime or other, in this life or another, each of these wishes will be granted – together, of course, with consequences.”

— Huston Smith

68. “We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

70. “Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake.”

— Huston Smith

71. “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

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

— Huston Smith

73. “Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

75. “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.”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

77. “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.”

— Huston Smith

78. “No individual is solely reflective, emotional, active, or experimental, and different life situations call for different resources to be brought into play. Most people will, on the whole, find travel on one road more satisfactory than on others and will consequently tend to keep close to it; but Hinduism encourages people to test all four and combine them as best suits their needs.”

— Huston Smith

79. “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

80. “Historical figures lose their center when they become anxious over the outcome of their actions.”

— Huston Smith

81. “Built into human makeup is a longing for a ‘more’ that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.”

— Huston Smith

82. “I had assumed that Bush’s seemingly inflexible policy to support Sharon was for political reasons of his getting elected. But as to whether he really believes his actions are going to hasten the day of the final conflict, I do not know.”

— Huston Smith

83. “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.”

— Huston Smith

84. “I simply wanted to experience the presence of this man who had revolutionized my understanding. After a while we sat in silence, gazing at the barren canyon walls. And the mute desert seemed to carry on our conversation for us.”

— Huston Smith

85. “The faith I was born into formed me.”

— Huston Smith

86. “So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues.”

— Huston Smith

87. “You can find God in the world of everyday affairs as readily as anywhere.11.”

— Huston Smith

88. “Today we do not live under a sacred canopy; it is marketing that forms the backdrop of our culture. The message that advertising dins into our conscious and unconscious minds is that fulfillment derives from the things we possess.”

— Huston Smith

89. “We should witness all things non-reactively, especially our moods and emotions, neither condemning some nor holding on to others.”

— Huston Smith

90. “After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others; otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.”

— Huston Smith

91. “To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life’s final and fascinating challenge.”

— Huston Smith

92. “Dismiss these post facto accounts as legends if we must; there is no question but that in his life as the Buddha the springs of tenderness gushed abundant. Wanting to draw the arrows of sorrow from everyone he met, he gave to each his sympathy, his enlightenment, and the strange power of soul, which, even when he barely spoke a word, gripped the hearts of his visitors and left them transformed.”

— Huston Smith

93. “The bhakta’s approach include repeating God’s name, as in praying without ceasing “keep the name of the Lord spinning in the midst of all your activities.” Washing or weaving, planting or shopping, imperceptibly but indelibly these verbal droplets of aspiration soak down into the subconscious, loading it with the divine.”

— Huston Smith

94. “The Infinite discloses itself, as much of itself as our finite minds can comprehend, by building the universal grammars of language and religion into our brains. We did not create those grammars; they were bequeathed to us.”

— Huston Smith

95. “The Transcendent was my morning meal, we had the Eternal at lunch, and I ate a slice of the Infinite at dinner.”

— Huston Smith

96. “All the basic principles of Bhakti yoga are richly exemplified in Christianity. From the Hindu point of view, Christianity is one great brilliantly lit highway toward God, not greater than other paths, but more clearly marked. On this path God is conceived differently than in jnana yoga, where the guiding image was of an infinite sea of being underlying the waves of our finite selves. This sea typified the all-pervading Self, which is a much within us as without.”

— Huston Smith

97. “In samadhi, the mind continues to think, but of no thing. This does not mean that it is thinking of nothing, that it is a total blank. It has perfected the paradox of seeing the invisible. It is filled with that which is “separated from all qualities, neither this nor that, without form, without a name.”

— Huston Smith

98. “These are what people really want, and they want them infinitely. To state the full truth, then, we must say that what people really would like to have is infinite being, infinite knowledge, and infinite bliss. Moksha is the release from the finitude that restricts us from the limitless being, consciousness, and bliss we desire.”

— Huston Smith

99. “Because this second position is powered by the hope that there may someday be a single world religion, it is well to remind ourselves again of the human element in the religious equation. There are people who want to have their own followers. They would prefer to head their own flock, however small, than be second-in-command in the largest congregation. This suggests that if we were to find ourselves with a single religion tomorrow, it is likely that there would be two the day after. p386.”

— Huston Smith

100. “Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago. Students now face a plethora of compartmentalized fields of knowledge. Uninstructed as to how they connect, students are given no sense of the whole, if indeed their instructors think a seamless fabric of knowledge exists.”

— Huston Smith