Top 100 Karen Armstrong Quotes
#1. I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.
Denis O'Hare
#2. Many entire nations are marginalised by the more powerful nations. That is causing imbalance, violence and terror. Women must do their best to introduce another perspective.
Karen Armstrong
#3. In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do.
Karen Armstrong
#4. It's a great event to get outside and enjoy nature. I find it very exciting no matter how many times I see bald eagles.
Karen Armstrong
#5. Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne "Holy Roman Emperor" in the Basilica of St. Peter. The congregation acclaimed him as "Augustus," and Leo prostrated himself at Charlemagne's feet.
Karen Armstrong
#6. Oedipus had to abandon his certainty, his clarity, and supposed insight in order to become aware of the dark ambiguity of the human condition.
Karen Armstrong
#7. We want to create, never mind the leaders or the bishops or chief rabbis or imams, or Popes. We want to create a grassroots movement where people will become attuned to uncompassionate discourse in the same way as we are now attuned to sort of gender imbalance in our speech.
Karen Armstrong
#8. The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight.
Karen Armstrong
#9. Muhammad preached his farewell sermon to the Muslim community. He reminded them to deal justly with one another, to treat women kindly, and to abandon the blood feuds and vendettas inspired by the spirit of jahiliyyah. Muslim must never fight against Muslim.
Karen Armstrong
#10. the attempt to become a compassionate human being is a lifelong project.
Karen Armstrong
#11. We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.
Karen Armstrong
#12. I was a lousy nun. I couldn't do it. I couldn't find God. It wasn't suitable for me. It is suitable for very few people.
Karen Armstrong
#13. One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.
Karen Armstrong
#14. We constantly have ideas and experiences that go beyond what we can say or know. Most often these are expressed in art, in painting, in music. Music, everyday confronts us with a form of knowing that doesn't depend on words.
Karen Armstrong
#15. Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.
Karen Armstrong
#16. Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus
Karen Armstrong
#17. And so, one of the reasons why I started my Charter for Compassion, was to bring the Golden Rule back to the center of religion and morality and not put other's secondary goals, less demand goals, into the forefront
Karen Armstrong
#18. The Taliban travesty, a noxious combination of Deobandi rigidity, tribal chauvinism, and the aggression of the traumatized war orphan.
Karen Armstrong
#19. Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.
Karen Armstrong
#20. Understanding different national, cultural, and religious traditions is no longer a luxury; it is now a necessity and must become a priority. The
Karen Armstrong
#21. There is something wrong with any spirituality that does not inspire selfless concern for others
Karen Armstrong
#22. I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.
Karen Armstrong
#23. In the West, we have deliberately excluded religion from political life and regard faith as an essentially private activity. But this is a modern development, dating only to the eighteenth century, and would have been incomprehensible to both Jesus and Paul.
Karen Armstrong
#24. Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.
Karen Armstrong
#25. the sacred reality is not simply transcendent, "out there," but is enshrined in every single human being, who must, therefore, be treated with absolute honor and respect.
Karen Armstrong
#27. dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, something always eluded them.
Karen Armstrong
#28. Let us bring something new to the table. Let us use our pain always to remember the others, bring them into the conversation, and get beyond the stereotypes and prejudices that create injustice all over the world.
Karen Armstrong
#30. Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate.
Karen Armstrong
#31. People worship different things; there must be 'no coercion in matters of faith!
Karen Armstrong
#32. I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.
Karen Armstrong
#33. included: no religious doctrine or practice can be authentic if it does not lead to practical compassion.
Karen Armstrong
#34. We should also make ourselves aware that our cultural, ethical, religious, and intellectual traditions have all been profoundly affected by other peoples'.
Karen Armstrong
#35. By using feminist arguments, for which most had little or no sympathy, as part of their propaganda, the colonialists tainted the cause of feminism in the Muslim world, and helped to distort the faith by introducing an imbalance that had not existed before.83 The
Karen Armstrong
#36. Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression.
Karen Armstrong
#37. Eminent monotheists in all three faiths - that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.
Karen Armstrong
#38. The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.
Karen Armstrong
#39. Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.
Karen Armstrong
#40. The new Sufi tariqahs founded at this time stressed the unlimited potential of human life. Sufis could experience on the
spiritual plane what the Mongols had so nearly achieved in terrestrial politics
Karen Armstrong
#41. The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith.
Karen Armstrong
#42. Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.
Karen Armstrong
#43. You put yourself in the receptive frame of mind with which we approach music or poetry, which you can measure the difference on a neurological scanner.
Karen Armstrong
#44. Deeds that seemed unimportant at the time would prove to have been momentous; a tiny act of selfishness and unkindness or, conversely, an unconsidered act of generosity would become the measure of a human life
Karen Armstrong
#45. We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.
Karen Armstrong
#46. You entered into a Socratic dialogue in order to change; the object of the exercise was to create a new, more authentic self.
Karen Armstrong
#47. There is a danger in monotheism, and it's called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine.
Karen Armstrong
#48. A double standard, albeit unintended, violates our integrity and damages our credibility. In a global society, conflict is rarely the fault of only one party.
Karen Armstrong
#49. We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at a physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself.
Karen Armstrong
#50. Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong.
Karen Armstrong
#51. Religion is a practical discipline and in the 17th century in the West, we turned it onto a head trip. But it's like dancing, or swimming, or driving, which you can't learn by texts. You have to get into the car and learn how to manipulate the vehicle.
Karen Armstrong
#52. The Qur'an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The
Karen Armstrong
#53. As the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."24
Karen Armstrong
#54. Here in America, religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They've lost the Axial Age vision of concern for everybody.
Karen Armstrong
#55. Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.
Karen Armstrong
#56. Often when religious leaders come together, they talk about a particular sexual ethic, or an abstruse doctrine, as though this, rather than compassion, was the test of spiritual life.
Karen Armstrong
#57. It's quite common for a Sufi mystic to cry in ecstasy that he's neither a Jew, a Christian, nor a Muslim. He is at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, or a church because when one's glimpsed the divine, one's left these man-made distinctions behind.
Karen Armstrong
#58. Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.
Karen Armstrong
#60. The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion. It would always be possible to make these scriptures endorse intolerant policies.
Karen Armstrong
#61. We talk about God as though he was like a somebody. We ask him to bless our nation, or save our Queen, or give us a fine day for the picnic. And we actually expect him to be on our side in an election or war even though our opponents are also God's children.
Karen Armstrong
#62. We have a duty to get to know one another, and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village.
Karen Armstrong
#63. our version of the same event is also likely to be a reflection upon our own situation and suffering rather than a dispassionate and wholly factual account. We
Karen Armstrong
#64. Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.
Karen Armstrong
#65. From the Muslims I learned from the extraordinary pluralism of the Koran, the fact that the Koran endorses every single one of the major world faiths, but I was particularly enthralled by the Sufi tradition, the mystical tradition of Islam, which is so open to other religious faiths.
Karen Armstrong
#66. Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.
Karen Armstrong
#67. In order to always treat others, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we have to learn about each other. Not just relying on an op-ed piece we may have read here, or a half-remembered interview on the television program there that happens to chime with our own views.
Karen Armstrong
#68. I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle.
Karen Armstrong
#69. Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.
Karen Armstrong
#70. And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.
Karen Armstrong
#71. I did not want to appear before the world as pathetic, deprssed, and psychologically ill. So I erected a barrier of words and wit around myself, so that nobody could see how needy I really was.
Karen Armstrong
#72. All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.
Karen Armstrong
#73. There was a growing conviction that religion had to become as rational as modern science.
Karen Armstrong
#74. We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.
Karen Armstrong
#75. The study of the traditions doesn't necessarily make you want to convert to another tradition, but it helps you to see your own differently and expands your outlook.
Karen Armstrong
#76. Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion.
Karen Armstrong
#77. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest point of Jesus's life was the moment when he forgave his executioners,
Karen Armstrong
#78. Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being
whoever he or she may be
is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery.
Karen Armstrong
#80. People would continue to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.
Karen Armstrong
#81. Compassion has to become a discipline. It's something that you do. It's no good thinking that you agree with compassion or not, you've just got to do it. Just like it's no good agreeing that it's possible to float, you just have to get into the pool and then you learn that it's possible.
Karen Armstrong
#82. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.
Karen Armstrong
#83. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God's transcendence.
Karen Armstrong
#84. Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears.
Karen Armstrong
#85. But during the nineteenth century, Europe was reconfigured into clearly defined states ruled by a central government.
Karen Armstrong
#86. Each of the world religions has its own particular genius, its own special insight into the nature and requirements of compassion, and has something unique to teach us.
Karen Armstrong
#87. If your child dies, or you witness a terrible natural disaster, yes, you certainly want a scientific explanation as to what's happened. But science can't help you to find meaning, help you deal with that turbulence of your grief, rage, and dismay.
Karen Armstrong
#88. At their best, all religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions are based on the principle of compassion. I
Karen Armstrong
#89. Ashoka's dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace.
Karen Armstrong
#90. What is lawful, what is unlawful?" asked Ku Yuan, prince and poet of Chu. "This country is a slough of despond! Nothing is pure any longer! Informers are exalted! And wise men of gentle birth are without renown!"3
Karen Armstrong
#91. There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour.
Karen Armstrong
#92. The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his ignorance, there was no way that anybody could win. Plato
Karen Armstrong
#93. Every single one of the major traditions - Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms - teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others.
Karen Armstrong
#94. I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
Karen Armstrong
#95. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I
Karen Armstrong
#97. What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level.
Karen Armstrong
#98. There is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.
Karen Armstrong
#99. By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective.
Karen Armstrong
#100. If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must treat him like one of your own people and love him as yourselves, for you were strangers in Egypt.
Karen Armstrong
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