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Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.

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
West
Teacher
Spiritual
Swami
Accomplished
Brilliant

More quotes by Huston Smith

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The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm.
Huston Smith
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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
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Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.
Huston Smith
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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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The faith I was born into formed me.
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...but with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'.
Huston Smith
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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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Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.
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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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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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.
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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When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade.
Huston Smith
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Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home.
Huston Smith
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God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
Huston Smith
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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
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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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We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.
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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In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.
Huston Smith