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As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves.

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
Made
Surpass
Transcending
Beings
Truly
Inspirational
Human
Humans

More quotes by 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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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.
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
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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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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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I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.
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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God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
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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...but with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'.
Huston Smith
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Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection.
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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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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Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times.
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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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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I'm not a chauvinist. I'm a universalist. I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.
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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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
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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