Huston Smith Quotes

I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human.

Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.

Fear created the first gods in the world.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Nearly every tribe and nearly every human being has gods. Belief in gods is all over the place. It's universal. It squeaks and squoozes from every pore of humanity.

Man did not evolve but was created.

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side of the angels.

Nature made us - nature did it all - not the gods of the religions.

People invent gods to explain their suffering.

I come from a family and a heritage where you don't really go to therapy unless you're crazy. I want people to know that that's so not the case. It's enriching, and I've learned this new tool.

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place--because we become better people in it.

I'm fascinated by mankind. I grew up watching 'Candid Camera' and thought it was funnier than any standup, any joke, anything that could possibly be written because you're dealing with humanity. And people can relate to that. It touches everybody who sees it. It hits a nerve.

Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.

We're still just the world's premium brand of ape.

People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God.

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Well, here’s a scientific question: Has anybody ever seen hard evidence? What we get is theories from our earlier prophets. Now, people who think that God invented us think that the Earth can’t be more than 6,000 years old. So I guess it’s a question of belief. My belief system doesn’t support a creator as such, as we can call God, who created us in His/Her/Its image.

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life--birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it.

Today evolution of human intelligence has advanced us to the stage where most of us are too smart to invent new gods but are reluctant to give up the old ones.

It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.