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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
Swami
Accomplished
Brilliant
West
Teacher
Spiritual

More quotes by 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
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With mind distracted, never thinking, Death is coming, To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life, And then to come out empty--it is a tragic error. (116) trans by Robert Thurman
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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The faith I was born into formed me.
Huston Smith
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It would be good if we bore one another's burdens.
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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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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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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In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.
Huston Smith
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The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.
Huston Smith
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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.
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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In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.
Huston Smith
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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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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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God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
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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...the single destination of sanctity could admit of so many different avenues leading to it.
Huston Smith
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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.
Huston Smith