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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.
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
Real
Poetry
Unless
Teacher
Celtic
Special
Opens
Language
Onto
Use
Telling
Business
Tradition
Truth
Poet
More quotes by Huston Smith
Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.
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If you are drilling for water, it's better to drill one 60-foot well than 10 6-foot wells.
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The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits
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I simply wanted to experience the presence of this man who had revolutionized my understanding. After a while we sat in silence, gazing at the barren canyon walls. And the mute desert seemed to carry on our conversation for us.
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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.
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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
...the single destination of sanctity could admit of so many different avenues leading to it.
Huston Smith
Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.
Huston Smith
What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past infinite service to all things present infinite responsibility to all things future.
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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.
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I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.
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Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.
Huston Smith
The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.
Huston Smith
Entheogens are not to be lightly trifled with... However, if taken with the right attitude and in the proper setting, psychoactive drugs may produce religious experiences. ...it is far less clear that they can produce religious lives.
Huston Smith
In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.
Huston Smith
As known unknowns become known unknown unknowns proliferate the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
Huston Smith
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
We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.
Huston Smith
The notion that Western religions are more rigid than those of Asia is overdrawn. Ours is the most permissive society history has ever known - almost the only thing that is forbidden now is to forbid - and Asian teachers and their progeny play up to this propensity by soft-pedaling Hinduism's, Buddhism's, Sufism's rules.
Huston Smith
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