“In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living.”
― Karen Armstrong
“All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith – even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.”
― 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
“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
“Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one’s mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse.”
― Karen Armstrong
“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
“Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Well, logos is science or reason, something that helps us to function practically and effectively in the world, and it must therefore be closely in tune and reflect accurately the realities of the world around us.”
― Karen Armstrong
“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
“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
“We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“I like silence; I’m a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.”
― Karen Armstrong
“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
“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
“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 the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Let’s use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people’s stories and histories.”
― Karen Armstrong
“After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I’d think, how awful.”
― 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
“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
“Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.”
― 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
“Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.”
― 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
“Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.”
― 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
“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
“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
“Well, the idea of God as a supreme being means that he is simply like us, writ large, and just bigger and better, the end product of the series; whereas this divine personality that we meet in the Bible was, for centuries, regarded simply as a symbol of a greater transcendence that lay beyond it.”
― Karen Armstrong
“A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.”
― Karen Armstrong
“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
“I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East – the slagging off of a whole religious tradition.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem.”
― Karen Armstrong
“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
“Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Human beings have always been mythmakers.”
― 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
“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
“For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.”
― Karen Armstrong
“When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Compassion doesn’t, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.”
― Karen Armstrong
“Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders.”
― Karen Armstrong
“I have a very sharp tongue, I’m very impatient, and it’s a lifelong struggle.”
― Karen Armstrong
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