Why Religion Matters Quotes

“Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“There is within us—in even the blithest, most lighthearted among us—a fundamental dis-ease. It acts like an unquenchable fire that renders the vast majority of us incapable in this life of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies in the marrow of our bones and the deep regions of our souls. All great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion tries to name and analyze this longing. We are seldom in direct touch with it, and indeed the modern world seems set on preventing us from getting in touch with it by covering it with an unending phantasmagoria of entertainments, obsessions, addictions, and distractions of every sort. But the longing is there, built into us like a jack-in-the-box that presses for release. Two great paintings suggest this longing in their titles—Gauguin’s Who Are We? Where Did We Come From? Where Are We Going? and de Chirico’s Nostalgia for the Infinite—but I must work with words. Whether we realize it or not, simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence, with its confining walls of finitude and mortality.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“peyote. Peyote is illegal in the United States at present. It is classified as a Schedule One drug—right up there with heroin—and the mistake begins right there, for peyote is a harmless cactus to which addiction is virtually impossible and to which not a single misdemeanor (let alone felony) has ever been traced. When we place this record alongside the ravages of alcohol the picture becomes surrealistic. Because alcohol is the sacrament of the dominant religion of the land, it passes muster; but peyote is “their” sacrament, so it does not.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“Emerson argued that “the whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men are convertible, and they are. They want awakening, [and for that purpose they need teachers] to get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep.” That”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“Today we do not live under a sacred canopy; it is marketing that forms the backdrop of our culture. The message that advertising dins into our conscious and unconscious minds is that fulfillment derives from the things we possess.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago. Students now face a plethora of compartmentalized fields of knowledge. Uninstructed as to how they connect, students are given no sense of the whole, if indeed their instructors think a seamless fabric of knowledge exists.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“Oliver Wendell Holmes’s way of establishing parity is appealing: “Science gives us major answers to minor questions, while religion gives us minor answers to major questions.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“Reminders of the sacred were everywhere, strewn about almost carelessly, we might say. Marco Pallis reported that in the traditional Tibet that he knew the entire landscape seemed to be suffused by the message of the Buddha's teachings. "It came to one with the air one breathed. Birds seemed to sing of it; mountain streams hummed its refrain as they bubbled across the stones. A holy perfume seemed to rise from every flower, at once a reminder and a pointer to what still needed doing. There were times when a man might have been forgiven for supposing himself already in the Pure Land.'

In times like those, explicit references to the sacred were hardly necessary, but those times are long gone. Today we do not live under a sacred canopy; it is marketing that forms the backdrop of our culture. The message that advertising dins into our conscious and unconscious minds is that fulfillment derives from the things we possess.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“Stated in my own words, the point comes down to this: minds require eco-niches as much as organisms do, and the mind's eco-niche is its worldview, its sense of the whole of things (however much or little that sense is articulated). Short of madness, there is some fit between the two, and we constantly try to improve that fit. Signs of a poor fit are the sense of meaninglessness, alienation, and anxiety that the twentieth century knew so well. The proof of a good fit is that life and the world make sense. When the fit feels perfect, the energies of the cosmos pour into the believer and empower her to a startling degree. She knows that she belongs. The Ultimate supports her, and the knowledge that it does that produces a wholeness that is solid for fitting as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into the wholeness of the All.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief

“I had not yet gotten around to the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s Consilience. When I did read it, I discovered on page 286 that people follow religion because it is “easier” than empiricism. That struck a nerve, and provoked a response I shall be candid enough to report. Mr. Wilson: When you have endured an eight-day O-sesshin in a Zen monastery, sitting cross-legged and motionless for twelve hours a day and allowed only three and one-half hours of sleep each night until sleep and dream deprivation bring on a temporary psychosis (my own nondescript self); When you have attended four “rains retreats” at the Insight Buddhist Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts, for a total of one complete year of no reading, no writing, no speaking, and eyes always downcast (my wife); When you have almost died from the austerities you underwent before you attained enlightenment under a bo tree in India; When you have been crucified on Golgatha; When you have been thrown to lions in the Roman coliseum; When you have been in a concentration camp and held on to some measure of dignity through your faith; When you have given your life to providing a dignified death for homeless, destitute women gathered from the streets of Calcutta (Mother Teresa), or played out her counterpart with the poor in New York City (Dorothy Day); When, Mr. Wilson, you have undergone any one of these trials, it will then be time to talk about the ease of religion as compared with the ardors of empiricism.”
― Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief