Karen Armstrong Quotes

106 quotes in 1775 categories

• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.
• Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.
• I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle.
• I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
• 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…
• Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.
• 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…
• 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…
• For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.
• If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we've got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life.
• 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,…
• I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.
• 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.
• The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.

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