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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.

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
Masters
Authors
Characters
Inward
Taking
Impulse
Rather
Master
Free
Slave
Become
Thus
Character
Distance
Dramas
Drama
Impulses

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As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves.
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What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.
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When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states.
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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.
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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.
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Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection.
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Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home.
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The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.
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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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Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.
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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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Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times.
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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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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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The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits
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In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.
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Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.
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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.
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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.
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