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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.

Huston Smith

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Huston Smith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1919
Born: May 31
Died: 2016
Died: December 30
Philosopher
Professor
Soochow
Huston Cummings Smith
Shows
Healing
True
Institutions
Government
Learning
Institutionalized
Pretty
Universities
Wonderful
Association
American
Medical
Show
Spirituality
Religion
University

More quotes by Huston Smith

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If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable.
Huston Smith
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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
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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
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God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.
Huston Smith
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The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.
Huston Smith
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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. Its the same in religion.
Huston Smith
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In order to live man must believe in that for which he lives.
Huston Smith
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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
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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
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The faith I was born into formed me.
Huston Smith
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God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
Huston Smith
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Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.
Huston Smith
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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
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Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like.
Huston Smith
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It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
Huston Smith
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The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.
Huston Smith
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The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits
Huston Smith
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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
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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
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Reserved as he [Confucius] was about the supernatural, he was not without it somewhere in the universe there was a power that was on the side of right.
Huston Smith