Huston Smith Quotes

Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

I confess it is beyond our power to awaken the heart, but ordinarily this way does good.

Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love.

When we die to something, something comes alive within us. If we die to self, charity comes alive; if we die to pride, service comes alive; if we die to lust, reverence for personality comes alive; if we die to anger, love comes alive.

Discard yourself and thereby regain yourself. Spread the trap of humility and ensnare love.

My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.

As long as in love there is "you" and "me," love is not fully kindled.

Love is selflessness and self-fullness; it can only be known deeply with an open, vulnerable heart.

Then relationship happens. Before that it is just an empty name. Relationship cannot happen before the egos are gone.

The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.

In love lies the seed of our growth. The more we love, the closer we are to the spiritual experience.

Love is the opposite of [lust]: respecting the other as an end unto himself or herself. When you love someone as an end unto himself, then there is no feeling of hurt; you become enriched through it. Love makes everybody rich.

Of all the definitions of love that abound in our universe, a special favorite of mine is... “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”

The capacity to love is tied to being able to be awake, to being able to move out of yourself and be with someone else in a manner that is not about your desire to possess them, but to be with them, to be in union and communion.

Love is not of the mind, it is not in the net of thought, it cannot be sought out, cultivated, cherished; it is there when the mind is silent and the heart is empty of the things of the mind.

LOVE is essentially self-communicative: those who do not have it catch it from those who have it.... No amount of rites, rituals, ceremonies, worship, meditation, penance and remembrance can produce love in themselves. None of these is necessarily a sign of love. On the contrary, those who sigh loudly and weep and wail have yet to experience love. Love sets on fire the one who finds it. At the same time it seals his lips so that no smoke comes out

Love is a state of being, and in that state, the 'me', with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions is absent. Love cannot be, as long as the activities of the self, of the 'me', whether conscious or unconscious, continue to exist.

To be in love is to surpass one's self.

Don't wait for some miracle to be performed on you from without, lifting you above your fears and doubts and self-centeredness. You help God from within by turning in outgoing love to others, and miraculously your fears and doubts and self-centeredness will vanish. The miracle starts within, not from without.

Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

These two criteria are like the pillars of true love: deeds, and the gift of self.

To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.

Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act.

Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

I never knew up to that time that God loved us so much. This heart of mine began to thaw out; I could not keep back the tears. I just drank it in...I tell you there is one thing that draws above everything else in the world and that is love.