Karen Armstrong Quotes

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

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.

There must be no coercion in matters of faith!

You are your best self when you give yourself away.

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

I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing.

Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.

We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.

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.

There is nothing in Islam that is more violent than Christianity.

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

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 study of the traditions doesn't necessarily make you want to convert to another tradition, but it helps you to see your own differently and expands your outlook.

You put yourself in the receptive frame of mind with which we approach music or poetry, which you can measure the difference on a neurological scanner.

I think I get from my books what other people get from family or a relationship or from prayer.

I used to hate religion, I loathed it in my angry days.

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

I am continually trying to find meaning in the world. If we cannot find some ultimate significance or value in our lives, we fall very easily into despair.

I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.

Many entire nations are marginalised by the more powerful nations. That is causing imbalance, violence and terror. Women must do their best to introduce another perspective.

Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders.

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.

Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong.

Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.

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.

For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.

Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.

Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.

It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.

My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.

I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle.

If professional religious leaders can [no longer] instruct..., our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.

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.

We are what we are because of the hard work, insights and achievements of countless others.

Humiliate your enemy is dangerous.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment.

Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion.

When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and mystery at the heart of existence.

I did not want to appear before the world as pathetic, deprssed, and psychologically ill. So I erected a barrier of words and wit around myself, so that nobody could see how needy I really was.

By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective.

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.