Quotes by Huston Smith

All -isms end up in schisms.

Seen through the eyes of faith, religion's future is secure. As long as there are human beings, there will be religion for the sufficient reason that the self is a theomorphic creature -- one whose morphe (form) is theos -- God encased within it. Having been created in the imago Dei, the image God, all human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them.

Professor Huston Smith, (from his 2004 Foreword to Pain, Sex and Time):

"Overnight, the book in hand converted me from the scientific worldview to the vaster world of the mystics. I applaud the decision to bring this book back into print."

In this absorbing and provocative book, Gerald Heard shows that a fissure in human consciousness, which has been rapidly widening for 400 years, is the cause of modern man's tragic dismay. Believing his problem external, when it is really in his own mind, man at last faces a "veritable Copernican revolution" psychologically. Science tells us that man is the only animal capable of continued evolution. It shows further that he can evolve in only one way-mentally. Pain, Sex and Time is then a new outlook, a new promise for the future, a new exploration of those strange and little-known powers of human consciousness of which man is becoming increasingly aware. Harper & Brothers, 1939

Pain, Sex and Time was James Dean's favorite book.

Pain, Sex and Time has been out of print for 60 years.

Understanding, then, can lead to love. But the revese is also true. Love brings understanding; the two are reciprocal. So we must listen to understand, but we must also listen to put into play the compassion that the wisdom traditions all enjoin, for it is impossible to love another without hearing that other. If we are to be true to these religions, we must attend to others as deeply and as alertly as we hope that they will attend to us; Thomas Merton made this point by saying that God speaks to us in three places: tin scripture, in our deepest selves, and in the voices of the stranger. We must have the graciousness to receive as well as to give, for there is no greater way to depersonalize another than to speak without also listening.

The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm.