Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

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

Huston Smith

Dead

Cultures

Facts

" In my town, I had only one adult American male role model: my father. I grew up taking it for granted that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be. "

Huston Smith

Father

American

" The Chinese began with the assumption that the group is the fundamental unit of reality. Individuals? Sure, we can factor them out from their groups, but let us not think that they as individuals have any viability apart from their group. "

" 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. "

" I happen to be a Christian. I was brought up and drenched in that. 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

Christian

Thinking

" God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus. "

" 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. "

" I don't have any fear of death. I do, however, have an inordinate fear of becoming dependent on other people. To me, that's the severest test, not death. "

Huston Smith

Death

Fear

" No one in human history has given as much thought to the interweaving of altered states of consciousness and religion as I have. "

" 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. "

" Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times. "

" 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. "

" 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. It's the same in religion. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That is not true. And I think I may have introduced a word which has now caught on quite a bit, scientism. Science is good. It simply reports a discovery. "

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

" The most powerful moral influence is example. "

" The faith I was born into formed me. I come from a missionary family - I grew up in China - and in my case, my religious upbringing was positive. Of course, not everyone has this experience. I know many of my students are what I have come to think of as wounded Christians or wounded Jews. "

Huston Smith

Family

Faith

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The modern period adds social ethics to religions agenda, for we now realize that social structures are not like laws of nature. They are human creations, so we are responsible for them. "

" Science is empirical, all about physical senses that tell us about the world. But physical senses are not the only senses we have. Nobody has ever seen a thought. Nobody has ever seen a feeling. And yet thoughts and feelings are where we live our lives most immediately, and science cannot connect with that. "

" In order to live man must believe in that for which he lives. "

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

Huston Smith

Dark

Woods

" The faith I was born into formed me. "

Huston Smith

Born

I Was Born

" 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

God

Mind

" 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. "

" The scientific method is nearly perfect for understanding the physical aspects of our life. But it is a radically limited viewfinder in its inability to offer values, morals and meanings that are at the center of our lives. "