Quote

If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable.

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
Divine
Bark
Read
Remarkable
Part
Madness
America
Ears
Today
Responsible
Really
Poet
Rumi
Good
Truly
Coleman
Poetry
Barks

More quotes by Huston Smith

Image
Human intelligence is a reflection of the intelligence that produces everything. In knowing, we are simply extending the intelligence that comes to and constitutes us. We mimic the mind of God, so to speak. Or better, we continue and extend it.
Huston Smith
Image
The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.
Huston Smith
Image
We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.
Huston Smith
Image
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.
Huston Smith
Image
God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
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 have a body and I have a soul. And my body belongs to the faith - in fact, the church - into which it was born, the Methodist Church.
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 faith I was born into formed me.
Huston Smith
Image
I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.
Huston Smith
Image
Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.
Huston Smith
Image
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
Image
What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It would be good if we bore one another's burdens.
Huston Smith
Image
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