Quote

The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.

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
Ways
Fire
Seeing
Three
Sufis
Way
Sufi
Described
Burned
Hearing

More quotes by Huston Smith

Image
...but with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'.
Huston Smith
Image
The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.
Huston Smith
Image
The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm.
Huston Smith
Image
Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection.
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
'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God' suggested to me a heavenly welfare program for the meek. Today that saying reveals an astute insight into egotism, about how those with swollen pride or vanity cannot see anything larger than themselves.
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
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
The faith I was born into formed me.
Huston Smith
Image
After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.
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
I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.
Huston Smith
Image
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.
Huston Smith
Image
Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.
Huston Smith
Image
Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.
Huston Smith
Image
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.
Huston Smith
Image
Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.
Huston Smith
Image
The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits
Huston Smith
Image
It would be good if we bore one another's burdens.
Huston Smith
Image
Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality.
Huston Smith