Huston Smith Quotes

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

Our lives are programmed at conception and are endowed with purpose and meaning.

When you know your reason for existence, it should effect the decisions you make.

All of us want to live, and that is absolutely natural. However, we should learn from childhood on to choose our best way to die. If we don't do that, we end up spending our days like a dog, only in search of harbour, food and expressing a blind loyalty to his owner in return. That isn't enough to make our lives have a meaning.

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'

You must engage at the level of people's higher order values, and in doing so, you can engage them in a meaningful way on a large number of issues.

I don't know why I'm alive but I know there's a reason for it.

The profound influence of religion on American politics is vital, but it is best when indirect: on the morals, habits, and souls of individual Americans; on the political climate and the principals that should guide policy, rather than on specific policies themselves…

A society with no values outside of politics is a machine carrying its human cargo, with no purpose in its institutions reflecting their care, eternal aspirations, loneliness, need for love.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel.

The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.

The selfie, like all technology, causes us to reflect on our human values. This is a good thing because it challenges us to figure out what they really are.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

As a child, I wondered often, 'Why are we? What is the meaning of life?' These questions made me realize that life is what has meaning - not just individual lives, but all of our lives.

'Do I have a purpose.' Right. And of course you do. Otherwise, you wouldn't be on Earth. I really strongly believe that if we're here, it's for a reason.

In life, we have two segments: arts and science. We need science to make our lives easier. But what do we live for? We enjoy life through arts. So it's an artistes duty to question the wrongs happening in the society.

Being attentive to the things that add meaning to our lives alongside politics will help us inform our politics with the values that really do make America great.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

Life is a four-letter word.

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

A man with nothing to die for has even less for which to live.

I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.

What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.