Karen Armstrong Quotes

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Karen Armstrong

Profession : Writer

Birth : November 14, 1944

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.

Karen Armstrong

Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.

Karen Armstrong

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.

Karen Armstrong

Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past.

Karen Armstrong

I believe in holiness and sacredness in other people. It doesn't mean that the clouds part and I see God. That's a juvenile way of thinking about it.

Karen Armstrong

If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we've got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life.

Karen Armstrong

Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.

Karen Armstrong

Human beings have always been mythmakers.

Karen Armstrong

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

Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.

Karen Armstrong

Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.

Karen Armstrong

At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France.

Karen Armstrong

Compassion is not a popular virtue.

Karen Armstrong

Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

Karen Armstrong

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

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

Karen Armstrong

The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight.

Karen Armstrong

The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.

Karen Armstrong

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?

Karen Armstrong

A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

Karen Armstrong