"The religions begin by assuring us that if we could see the full picture we would find it more integrated than we would normally suppose. Life gives us no view of the whole. [...] It is as if life were a great tapestry, which we face from its wrong side. This gives it the appearance of a maze of knots and threads, which for the most part appear chaotic. From a purely human standpoint the wisdom traditions are the species' most prolonged and serious attempts to infer from the maze on this side of the tapestry the pattern which, on its right side, gives meaning to the whole. As the beauty and harmony of the design derive from the way its parts are related, the design confers on these parts a significance that we, seeing only scraps of the design, do not normally perceive."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Philosophers from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesMethodists from the United StatesTheologians from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Huston_Smith
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Huston Smith
Huston Smith (May 31, 1919 – December 30, 2016) was a religious studies scholar in the United States, notable for the number of religions of which he considers or has considered himself a member. He is most well known for his book The World's Religions, formerly titled The Religions of Man.
35 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Huston Smith →
Related Quotes
"No other civilization saw, appreciated, and classified so precisely the full spectrum of human personality types ... …"
"Hinduism's cosmology was prodigious in scope and depth, but India did not stop there. She went on to advance what was…"
"It is obtuse to confuse Hinduism's images with idolatry, and their multiplicity with polytheism. They are 'runways' f…"
"The invisible excludes nothing, the invisible that excludes nothing is the infmite - the soul of India is the infmite."
"Philosophers tell us that the Indians were the first ones to conceive of a true infmite from which nothing is exclude…"
"And it is here that India's mind boggling variety links up to her infinite soul... India includes so much because her…"
"While the West was still thinking, perhaps, of 6,000 years old universe - India was already envisioning ages and eons…"
"The sheer immensity of the human self as envisioned by the world's religions is awesome."
"In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of kno…"
"When I read the Upanishads, I found a profundity of world view that made my Christianity seem like third grade."