Karen Armstrong Quotes
Top 96 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
The Taliban travesty, a noxious combination of Deobandi rigidity, tribal chauvinism, and the aggression of the traumatized war orphan.
Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.
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.
But was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression.
I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing.
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
For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.
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.
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.
We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.
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.
I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.
Understanding different national, cultural, and religious traditions is no longer a luxury; it is now a necessity and must become a priority. The
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.