Quote

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

Huston Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Huston Smith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1919
Born: May 31
Died: 2016
Died: December 30
Philosopher
Professor
Soochow
Huston Cummings Smith
Science
Newtonian
Lured
Rationalism
Metaphysics
Rescue
Woods
Dark

More quotes by Huston Smith

Image
Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times.
Huston Smith
Image
God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.
Huston Smith
Image
It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
Huston Smith
Image
We become compassionate not from altruism which denies the self for the sake of the other, but from the insight that sees and feels one is the other.
Huston Smith
Image
It must have been providence that directed Joel Morwood to dig in the right place, for he struck a lode of pure gold, as wide (comprehensive) as it is deep (profound). What he mined from that lode is a spiritual treasure.
Huston Smith
Image
The faith I was born into formed me.
Huston Smith
Image
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.
Huston Smith
Image
Walnuts have a shell, and they have a kernel. Religions are the same. They have an essence, but then they have a protective coating. This is not the only way to put it. But it's my way. So the kernels are the same. However, the shells are different.
Huston Smith
Image
Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.
Huston Smith
Image
...the single destination of sanctity could admit of so many different avenues leading to it.
Huston Smith
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.
Huston Smith
Image
Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home.
Huston Smith
Image
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.
Huston Smith
Image
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.
Huston Smith
Image
After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.
Huston Smith
Image
I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.
Huston Smith
Image
We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.
Huston Smith
Image
The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.
Huston Smith