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As known unknowns become known unknown unknowns proliferate the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

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
Islands
Larger
Unknown
Longer
Wonder
Proliferate
Known
Unknowns
Knowledge
Shoreline
Become
Island

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm.
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Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.
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I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions, and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find, and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.
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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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I think it matters almost infinitely that we practice one of the authentic religions. But if you mean does it make any difference which. The answer is no, as long as each is followed with equal intensity, sincerity, dedication.
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If you are drilling for water, it's better to drill one 60-foot well than 10 6-foot wells.
Huston Smith
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In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.
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God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.
Huston Smith
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I would not say that ethical behavior is not possible for the atheist or agnostic. It is. A couple of pretty good examples are Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, I will have to say that if we take the human lot as a whole, these two men must be seen as exceptions.
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Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
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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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