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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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Huston Smith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1919
Born: May 31
Died: 2016
Died: December 30
Philosopher
Professor
Soochow
Huston Cummings Smith
Sees
Deny
Sake
Compassion
Become
Denies
Self
Altruism
Feels
Compassionate
Insight

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The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.
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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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I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.
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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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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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The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm.
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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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...the single destination of sanctity could admit of so many different avenues leading to it.
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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.
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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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God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.
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...but with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'.
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What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.
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In order to live man must believe in that for which he lives.
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Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.
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God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
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Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.
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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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Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like.
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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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