Huston Smith In His Own Words
Here is a crash course — through a journey of selected quotes — in the work and writings of the late Huston Smith.
“This book is about religion that exists, in William James’ contrast, not as a dull habit but as an acute fever. It is about religion alive.” (The World’s Religions)
“Religion alive confronts the individual with the most momentous option life can present. It calls the soul to the highest adventure it can undertake, a proposed journey across the jungles, peaks, and deserts of the human spirit. The call is to confront reality, to master the self. Those who dare to hear and follow that secret call soon learn the dangers and difficulties of its lonely journey.” (The World’s Religions)
“Authentic religion is the clearest opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos enter human life.” (The World’s Religions)
“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 is 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?” (The World’s Religions)
“Every religion mixes universal principles with local peculiarities.” (The World’s Religions)
“The full-story of religion is not rose-colored; often it is crude.” (The World’s Religions)
“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.”
“Given the choice — to remain aloof as disembodied insights or to establish traction in history by institutionalizing those insights — religion chose the wiser course.” (The World’s Religions)
“We hear that East and West are meeting, but it is an understatement. They are being flung at one another, hurled with the force of atoms, the speed of jets, the restlessness of minds impatient to learn the ways of others.” (The World’s Religions)
“Religion teaches us that our lives here on earth are to be used for transformation.”
“Religion serves as the soul of community.”
“If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race. ” (The World’s Religions)
“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.” (Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization)
“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.”
“These are interesting times, very promising times in many ways. We may have started to work our way out of our excessive secularism. We seem to be realizing that materialism, secularism, reductionism, and consumerism are inadequate premises on which to lead our lives — that they drain the wonder and the mystery out of life and experience and are dead ends.” (Why Religion Matters)
“In the post-individualistic era, science and spirituality will become allies, and human beings will realize a vast potentiality now only dimly felt.”
“We are a blend of dust and divinity.”
“The community today can be no single tradition; it is the planet.” (Why Religion Matters)
“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.”
“Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?”
“The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits.”
“The most powerful moral influence is example.”
“As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves.”
“Without attention, the human sense of wonder and the holy will stir occasionally, but to become a steady flame it must be tended.” (The World’s Religions)
“To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life’s final and fascinating challenge.” (The World’s Religions)
“Reality is steeped in ineluctable mystery: we are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.” (Why Religion Matters)
“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.”
“Seen through the eyes of faith, religion’s future is secure. As long as there are human beings, there will be religion for the sufficient reason that the self is a theomorphic creature — one whose morphe (form) is theos — God encased within it. Having been created in the imago Dei, the image God, all human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them.” (Why Religion Matters)
“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.” (Why Religion Matters)
“Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us.”
“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.” (Why Religion Matters)
