Tales of Wonder Quotes

“We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.


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― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“Some friends accused me of whoring after the Infinite. Well, what better whoredom is there?”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“The Infinite discloses itself, as much of itself as our finite minds can comprehend, by building the universal grammars of language and religion into our brains. We did not create those grammars; they were bequeathed to us.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“In Buddhism monks recite daily the Five Remembrances, which are: I will lose my youth, my health, my dear ones and everything I hold dear, and finally lose life itself, by the very nature of my being human. These are bitter reminders that the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action. The fact that all the things we hold dear and love are transient does not mean that we should love them less but—as I do Karen and Serena—love them even more. Suffering, the Buddha said, if it does not diminish love, will transport you to the farther shore.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“After all our time living together, my identity is not self-contained: I am the way I am because she is the way she is. This “marriage of true minds” Shakespeare spoke of does not occur at the wedding nuptials but after sixty-five years of wedlock we may be getting there.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“There are worse kinds of infidelity than the sexual. I was living with one of the most interesting women in the world, and too often my attention was elsewhere.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“Symbolism is the science of understanding the relations between the multiple levels of reality.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“Our life in historical or chronological time, measuring and minding, cautious and comparing, forms the horizontal arm of the cross. Our experience of the unqualified, of inner, immeasurable time (or timelessness), is the cross’s vertical pole. We live in two kinds of time or perspective simultaneously. The horizontal and the vertical are at once quite distinct and entirely overlapping, and to experience their incongruity and confluence is what it means to be human.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“The Transcendent was my morning meal, we had the Eternal at lunch, and I ate a slice of the Infinite at dinner.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“Suffering led the Buddha to enlightenment, and it may cause us, against our will, to grow in compassion, awareness, and possibly eventually peace.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“Your reasoning is fine, but your experience is limited. Enlarge your experience, and your philosophy will be different.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“And it was from a Hindu, Swami Satprakashananda with his Christmas talks on “Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” that I received the strongest confirmation—by an outside examiner, as it were—of Jesus’s divine nature.”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

“And Americans were—before the Vietnam War, before the Iraq wars—the darlings of everyone everywhere. On a second world trip a decade later, on which I took students for academic credit, the most treasured gift we could give was a John F. Kennedy half-dollar. There”
― Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography