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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.

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
Cannot
Baptized
Body
Meanwhile
Soul
Confined
Human
Institution
Humans
Buried
Institutions
Church
Methodist
Born
Methodists

More quotes by Huston Smith

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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.
Huston Smith
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Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like.
Huston Smith
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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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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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Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.
Huston Smith
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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.
Huston Smith
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Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times.
Huston Smith
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God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
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.
Huston Smith
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Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.
Huston Smith
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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
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What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.
Huston Smith
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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.
Huston Smith
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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.
Huston Smith
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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
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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.
Huston Smith
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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.
Huston Smith
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Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.
Huston Smith
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The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.
Huston Smith
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Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.
Huston Smith