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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

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Huston Smith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1919
Born: May 31
Died: 2016
Died: December 30
Philosopher
Professor
Soochow
Huston Cummings Smith
Life
Difficulty
Difficulties
Promise
Ending
Joy
Peculiar
Religious
Overcome
Happy
Center
Ordeals
Human
Overcoming
Blossoms
Humans
Necessarily
Embraced
Kind
Painful
Prospect

More quotes by Huston Smith

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Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.
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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.
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Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.
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In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade.
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Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.
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The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm.
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It would be good if we bore one another's burdens.
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Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home.
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...like a magnetic compass turning north, I always tried to head in the direction of the better, which is the direction to God. ...the directions that appeared to lead away from Christianity led me deeper into it.
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Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like.
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Not only is the destiny of the individual bound up with the entire Church it is responsible for helping to sanctify the entire world of nature and history.
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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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God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.
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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.
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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