Huston Smith Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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We live in a fast-paced culture where we're asked to make snap decisions all day long, so I suppose cash-point donations feed into the immediacy of our life experience. So it's a great idea. But I think it needs careful handling.
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Being listened to and being heard is an experience that doesn't happen terribly often. To listen compassionately or nonjudgmentally to another person - not to get too heavy about it - but I once heard somebody say that was a form of real prayer.
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But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
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Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.
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For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.
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Looking back, I've always enjoyed hearing about the lives of other people, their experience through their jobs, their lives, and their children. It's always been a treat to hear about others.
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Shooting at Coco Chanel's apartment was an unexpectedly absorbing experience. The essence of Chanel is firmly rooted there in all of her possessions, and I truly believe that her spirit and soul still inhabit the second floor.
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I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid.
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I don't often do a lot of that kind of research, but when it's something specific like 'Oz' - which I fortunately did not have a lot of experience with - I will. I read 'The Hot House,' about being on the inside at Leavenworth prison.
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I studied Shakespeare all through high school. Both of my parents teach English and history, so it has always been around my experience as a young man.
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We are in the midst of a momentous catastrophe of world history, of a transformation of all aspects of life and of the entire inner human being This is perhaps fortunate for the artistic person, if he is strong enough to bear the consequences, because what we need is the courage to have inner experience.
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I feel like there's a hunger in the culture now for the live experience maybe as a counterpoint to the more sort of synthetic lives that we've been living.
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I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping my experience of the world. I had to go to the Northeast for graduate school because I felt like I had to get far away from my South, be outside it, to understand it.
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Christ shared our experience; he suffered as we suffer; he died as we shall die, and for forty days in the desert he underwent the struggle between good and evil.
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When they come to Europe, they are confronted by still closed borders. Thus, the concept of open borders is a very selective concept, one that is not taken seriously at all in the experience of non-Europeans.
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The mind when it has an old experience will add that data into its current experience, and it keeps coming up with wrong answers.
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The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
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Teaching in the upper elementary grades had given me a deep appreciation of the gifts and graces that are specific to individuals with ten or eleven years of experience as human beings. It is, I think, a magical time - when so much has been learned, but not yet enough to entirely extinguish the magical reach and freedom of early childhood.
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Heroes are a way to remove yourself from what may be difficult concepts to talk about in your life. They're a way to get some distance and have an experience in a theater where you're confronting those issues in a way that's safer for your psyche.
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We have made some great strides in terms of treating various types of cancer with early detection. The success rate of recovery for many people today is better than it was a decade or two ago so we can't give up. Yes, we would all love a quick "cure all" but that is not reality. Until then, we all are in this together and we have to keep working towards more progress!
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I could have carried on in comedy. But my life was dark.
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A lot of getting a song done is booking the studio time.
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People cain't help being what they are any more than a skunk can help being a skunk. Don't you think if they had their choice they would rather be something else? Sure they would. People are just weak.
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I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience.
