Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

“He insisted that it was impossible to understand a single word of the Book of Nature without knowing the language of mathematics.”

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

Sometimes I call myself a freelance, I can't see any one of the great religions as superior to others.

— Karen Armstrong

“Charity,” Davidson continues, “is forced on us, whether we like it or not; if we want to understand others, we must count…

— Karen Armstrong

Often when religious leaders come together, they talk about a particular sexual ethic, or an abstruse doctrine, as though this, rather than…

— 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;…

— Karen Armstrong

Deeds that seemed unimportant at the time would prove to have been momentous; a tiny act of selfishness and unkindness or, conversely,…

— Karen Armstrong

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in…

— Karen Armstrong

If we could view Muhammad as we do any other important historical figure we would surely consider him to be one of…

— Karen Armstrong

The study of the traditions doesn't necessarily make you want to convert to another tradition, but it helps you to see your…

— Karen Armstrong

“In your mindfulness practice, notice how often, without thinking, you try to manipulate, control, or exploit others—sometimes in tiny and apparently unimportant…

— Karen Armstrong

The awful atrocities of religion happened when people assume that God shares your likes and dislikes. The Crusaders when into battle to…

— Karen Armstrong

Illness itself can make you angry, enraged, furious, and it made me angry, enraged, and furious. I don't think it brought me…

— Karen Armstrong

The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded…

— Karen Armstrong

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is…

— Karen Armstrong

“I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around…

— Karen Armstrong

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying…

— Karen Armstrong

“We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of…

— Karen Armstrong

Compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us…

— Karen Armstrong

“A personalized God can be a mere idol carved in our own image- a projection of our limited needs, fears, and desires.…

— Karen Armstrong

Alexander's achievement was not the conquest of India, but the feat of actually getting there and his two years in India were…

— Karen Armstrong

Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked…

— Karen Armstrong

People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And…

— Karen Armstrong

“Pascal's scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe,…

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

“true insight does not consist of the acquisition of information but comes from mastering our egotism and greed.5”

— Karen Armstrong

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

— 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…

— Karen Armstrong

“Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the plank in your own?”

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

“advocates of evolutionary theory since Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) have found altruism problematic.”

— Karen Armstrong