Huston Smith

“Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for ‘art,’ because for Indians everything is art.”

— Huston Smith

The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm.

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

The Buddha is in me, the Buddha is in you. Live up to it.

— Huston Smith

My body was born into the - baptized in the Methodist church, and it will be buried in the Methodist Church. Meanwhile,…

— Huston Smith

...like a magnetic compass turning north, I always tried to head in the direction of the better, which is the direction to…

— Huston Smith

“Religion arose out of celebration and its opposite, bereavement, both of which cry out for collective expression.”

— Huston Smith

Science is like a flashlight in the hands of people living in a huge balloon. They can illuminate anything in the balloon,…

— Huston Smith

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

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become…

— Huston Smith

After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others; otherwise his vision would have receded into…

— Huston Smith

I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life the way God would have acted if God had assumed…

— Huston Smith

The New Age movement looks like a mixed bag. I see much in it that seems good: It's optimistic; it's enthusiastic; it…

— Huston Smith

Walnuts have a shell, and they have a kernel. Religions are the same. They have an essence, but then they have a…

— Huston Smith

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence -…

— Huston Smith

the heart of religion is not altered states but altered traits of character. For me, then, the test of a substance's religious…

— Huston Smith

“Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and…

— Huston Smith

I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That…

— Huston Smith

Entheogens are not to be lightly trifled with... However, if taken with the right attitude and in the proper setting, psychoactive drugs…

— Huston Smith

It remained for the twentieth century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this…

— Huston Smith

“Building upon this early conception of the Church, Christians came to think of it as having a double aspect. Insofar as it…

— Huston Smith

“How many planes there are, we do not know. The levels of nature that science discriminates give us no clue, for these…

— Huston Smith

“The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover…

— Huston Smith

“What a strange fellowship this is, the God seekers in every land, lifting their voices in the most disparate ways imaginable to…

— Huston Smith

In India there was a sense of time that does not tick with modern clocks, just as there is a knowledge that…

— Huston Smith

“Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size…

— Huston Smith

As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of…

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

“Some friends accused me of whoring after the Infinite. Well, what better whoredom is there?”

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

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

— Huston Smith

You subtract Christianity from Huston Smith, and there is no Huston Smith left.

— Huston Smith