Huston Smith
Huston Smith
Huston Cummings Smithis a religious studies scholar in the United States. His book The World's Religionshas sold over two million copies and remains a popular introduction to comparative religion...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTheologian
Date of Birth31 May 1919
CountryUnited States of America
joy fullness destroyed
We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.
race world endure
If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.
powerful example moral
The most powerful moral influence is example.
jesus confined defined
God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
isms schism ends
All -isms end up in schisms.
spiritual thinking civilization
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.
religious joy promise
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.
god creative interchange
God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.
moving love-is self
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.
differences unity blind
Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us.
challenges everyday recreation
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.
sex epiphany divine
Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany.
plato reflection caves
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.
energy atoms sun
It remained for the twentieth century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine-the imago dei-image of God, it is sometimes called. And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case love's bombardment