Karen Armstrong Quotes

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.

Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Religion isn’t about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God [is] not the exclusive property of any one tradition. The divine light [cannot] be confined to a single lamp, belonging to the East or the West, but enlightens all human beings.

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

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

Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Geniuses are not always pleasant people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Compassion is not a popular virtue

Intelligence doesn't just mean tracking down terrorists; It means finding out what is in people's hearts and minds and discovering the complexity of most issues.

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

I'm seeking to make sense of life, looking for its meaning and how we can have a better humanity.

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.

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

If we could view Muhammad as we do any other important historical figure we would surely consider him to be one of the greatest geniuses the world has known.

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.

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.

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