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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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Huston Smith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1919
Born: May 31
Died: 2016
Died: December 30
Philosopher
Professor
Soochow
Huston Cummings Smith
Giving
Evidence
Proves
Believe
Prove
Addition
Really
Citizens
Allegiance
Nation
Pledge
Gives
Whereas
Nations
Assume
Actually
Believing
Words
Assuming

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What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.
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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 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.
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Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.
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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.
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'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God' suggested to me a heavenly welfare program for the meek. Today that saying reveals an astute insight into egotism, about how those with swollen pride or vanity cannot see anything larger than themselves.
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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.
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Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection.
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If human life is to survive on this planet, the old dualistic worldview, with people on one side and the environment on the other, must yield to a new vision that connects us with everything else and leads us to care for and take responsibility for it.
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Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.
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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.
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As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves.
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Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.
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It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
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It would be good if we bore one another's burdens.
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My body was born into the - baptized in the Methodist church, and it will be buried in the Methodist Church. Meanwhile, I have a soul. And my soul cannot be confined to any human institution.
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In order to live man must believe in that for which he lives.
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I think it matters almost infinitely that we practice one of the authentic religions. But if you mean does it make any difference which. The answer is no, as long as each is followed with equal intensity, sincerity, dedication.
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Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.
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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