Karen Armstrong quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Karen Armstrong on Wise Famous Quotes.

A gentleman is not born but crafted. He had to work on himself in the same way as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.

Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.

I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time.

The Taliban travesty, a noxious combination of Deobandi rigidity, tribal chauvinism, and the aggression of the traumatized war orphan.

Any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred or disdain for others was illegitimate,

In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression.

There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour.

Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.

There was a growing conviction that religion had to become as rational as modern science.

Each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

The great task of our time is to build a global society, where people can live together in peace

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.

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.

People who have been taught to despise themselves cannot easily respect others.

Jefferson the deist was accused of being an atheist and even a Muslim.

But was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled.

Geniuses are not always pleasant people.

It did seem unjust that Jane, who was by far the abler of the two, should sacrifice her career for Mark's.

included: no religious doctrine or practice can be authentic if it does not lead to practical compassion.

My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I

A person who is impartial, fair, calm, gentle, serene, accepting, and openhearted is indeed a refuge.

I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.

Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.

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.

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

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

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

Compassion is not a popular virtue.

My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.

Religions don't own compassion; it is a human virtue.

I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.

I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.

Oedipus had to abandon his certainty, his clarity, and supposed insight in order to become aware of the dark ambiguity of the human condition.

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

Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.

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.

The Qur'an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The

Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.

[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

My greatest solace is my study. If I am deprived of my study, I can become lost, unhappy and unhinged.

All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.

There is nothing in Islam that is more violent than Christianity.

Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories.

Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders.

There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.

There is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.

A mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms.

even the presidents of Harvard and Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God's design for the overthrow of Catholicism.

Compassion has dropped so far out of sight these days that many are confused about what is required. It even inspires overt hostility.

Here in America, religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They've lost the Axial Age vision of concern for everybody.

It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.

People worship different things; there must be 'no coercion in matters of faith!

When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.

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.

At their best, all religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions are based on the principle of compassion. I

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.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

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.

You entered into a Socratic dialogue in order to change; the object of the exercise was to create a new, more authentic self.

We are trying to retrain our responses and form mental habits that are kinder, gentler, and less fearful of others.

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

There is something wrong with any spirituality that does not inspire selfless concern for others

Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression.

Humiliate your enemy is dangerous.

I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing.

We are meaning-seeking creatures.

Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong.

Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder.

The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The

What do you think Socrates meant when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Third,

For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.

the attempt to become a compassionate human being is a lifelong project.

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

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.

all who benefit from the inherent violence of the state are implicated in its cruelty.

if we harm our neighbors, we also inflict damage on ourselves. There

We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.

What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level.

You are your best self when you give yourself away.

We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.

I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle.

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence.

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

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.

Human beings have always been mythmakers.

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

I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.

Mythology is usually inseparable from ritual.

Understanding different national, cultural, and religious traditions is no longer a luxury; it is now a necessity and must become a priority. The

Compassion is not an option. It's the key to our survival.

We are what we are because of the hard work, insights and achievements of countless others.

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element.

But during the nineteenth century, Europe was reconfigured into clearly defined states ruled by a central government.

Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.

Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest point of Jesus's life was the moment when he forgave his executioners,