Karen Armstrong Quotes & Sayings

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

It is simply not true that "religion" is always aggressive. Sometimes it has actually put a brake on violence. In the ninth century BCE, Indian ritualists extracted all violence from the liturgy and created the ideal of ahimsa, "nonviolence." The medieval Peace and Truce of God forced knights to stop terrorizing the poor and outlawed violence from Wednesday to Sunday each week. Most dramatically, after the Bar Kokhba war, the rabbis reinterpreted the scriptures so effectively that Jews refrained from political aggression for a millennium. Such successes have been rare. Because of the inherent violence of the states in which we live, the best that prophets and sages have been able to do is provide an alternative. — Karen Armstrong

We have a duty to get to know one another, and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village. — Karen Armstrong

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

I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity. — Karen Armstrong

Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders. — Karen Armstrong

Roman coins, inscriptions, and temples extolled Augustus, who had brought peace to the world after a century of brutal warfare, as "Son of God," "lord," and "savior" and announced the "good news" (euaggelia) of his birth. Thus when the angel announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, he proclaimed: "Listen, I bring you euaggelion of great joy! Today a Savior has been born to you." Yet this "son of God" was born homeless and would soon become a refugee.37 — Karen Armstrong

It did seem unjust that Jane, who was by far the abler of the two, should sacrifice her career for Mark's. — Karen Armstrong

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. — Karen Armstrong

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of all true religiousness. — Karen Armstrong

Understanding different national, cultural, and religious traditions is no longer a luxury; it is now a necessity and must become a priority. The — Karen Armstrong

We can't say what God is, and until the modern period, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians in the three God religions all knew that. They insisted that we have no idea what we meant when we said that God was good, or wise, or intelligent. — Karen Armstrong

Every single one of the major traditions - Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms - teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others. — Karen Armstrong

Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong. — Karen Armstrong

A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed. — Karen Armstrong

I had tried, as I thought as a nun, to open myself to God and God seemed totally uninterested in me. The heavens remained closed and opaque. I now realize, of course, that I had a very, very inadequate idea of God. I was expecting clouds to part, a little sort of whisper in my ear, and of course, that's not what God is. God is not another being; we are talking about something much more profound. — Karen Armstrong

Every single one of the major world faiths, whether we're talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have all come to the conclusion that what holds us back from our better self is ego, selfishness, greed, unkindness, hatred. And it all springs from a sense of thwarted ego. — Karen Armstrong

There was a growing conviction that religion had to become as rational as modern science. — Karen Armstrong

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice. — Karen Armstrong

Charity," Davidson continues, "is forced on us, whether we like it or not; if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters."13 — Karen Armstrong

We should also make ourselves aware that our cultural, ethical, religious, and intellectual traditions have all been profoundly affected by other peoples'. — Karen Armstrong

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

Wordsworth had discerned a 'spirit' which was at one and the same time immanent in and distinct from natural phenomena:
'A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things. — 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

Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves. — Karen Armstrong

Religion is a practical discipline and in the 17th century in the West, we turned it onto a head trip. But it's like dancing, or swimming, or driving, which you can't learn by texts. You have to get into the car and learn how to manipulate the vehicle. — Karen Armstrong

But was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled. — Karen Armstrong

the sacred reality is not simply transcendent, "out there," but is enshrined in every single human being, who must, therefore, be treated with absolute honor and respect. — Karen Armstrong

Christian spirituality had been strongly influenced by Platonism, which sought to liberate the soul from the body, but in some circles in the early fourth century, people were beginning to hope that their hitherto despised bodies could bring men and women to the divine - or at least that it was not a reality separate from the physical, as the Platonists held.25 — Karen Armstrong

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence. — Karen Armstrong

Compassion has dropped so far out of sight these days that many are confused about what is required. It even inspires overt hostility. — Karen Armstrong

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

My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I — Karen Armstrong

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

We have to make a disciplined effort to find out what our governments are doing in these various parts of the world and what is actually happening. We have to learn to listen to each other's stories. Something we are not very good at. — Karen Armstrong

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God. — Karen Armstrong

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. — Karen Armstrong

Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions... Qur'anic reciters chant long phrases for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that this has a calming, therapeutic effect, which enables them to grasp the more elusive teachings of the text. — Karen Armstrong

Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization. — 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

Krishna explains. When enemies become too numerous and powerful, they should be slain by deceit and stratagems. This was the path formerly trodden by the devas to slay the asuras; and a path trodden by the virtuous may be trodden by all. — 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

Deuteronomy had listed a number of obligatory laws, which had included the Ten Commandments. During and immediately after the exile, this had been elaborated into a complex legislation consisting of the 613 commandments (mitzvot) in the Pentateuch. These minute directives seem off-putting to an outsider and have been presented in a very negative light by New Testament polemic. Jews did not find them a crushing burden, as Christians tend to imagine, but found that they were a symbolic way of living in the presence of God. In — 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

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

Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice. — 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 found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind. — Karen Armstrong

You know how it is in the symphony when you are listening to the symphony, the last notes die away, and there's often a beat of silence in the auditorium before the applause begins. It's a very full and pregnant silence. Now theology should bring us to live into that silence, into that pregnant pause. — Karen Armstrong

The Rhineland cities were developing the market economy that would eventually replace agrarian civilization; they were therefore in the very early stages of modernization, a transition that always strains social relations. — Karen Armstrong

One might well wonder how much more unanimously opposed to terror the Muslim world might have become, but for the course the United States and its allies took in the wake of 9/11. At a time when even in Tehran there were demonstrations of solidarity with America, the Bush and Blair coalition lashed out with its own violent rejoinder, a drive that would culminate in the tragically misbegotten Iraq invasion of 2003. Its — Karen Armstrong

Muhammad preached his farewell sermon to the Muslim community. He reminded them to deal justly with one another, to treat women kindly, and to abandon the blood feuds and vendettas inspired by the spirit of jahiliyyah. Muslim must never fight against Muslim. — Karen Armstrong

The awful atrocities of religion happened when people assume that God shares your likes and dislikes. The Crusaders when into battle to kill Muslims and Jews and cried, "God will's it." That was their battle cry. Obviously God willed no such thing. The Crusaders were simply projecting onto a deity they'd created on their own image and likeness, all their hatred and loathing of these faiths and made it endorse some of their most awful prejudices and lethal prejudices. — Karen Armstrong

The Meccan merchants had met Christian monks and hermits during their travels, and were familiar with the stories of Jesus and the concepts of Paradise and the Last Judgment. They called Jews and Christians the ahl al-kitab ("the People of the Book"). They admired the notion of a revealed text and wished they had sacred scripture in their own language. — 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

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. — Karen Armstrong

There is nothing in Islam that is more violent than Christianity. — Karen Armstrong

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

Eminent monotheists in all three faiths - that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. — Karen Armstrong

You have to get into the water and learn against what seems to be the law gravity to float and dancing, or athletics takes you years before you develop a skill. But if you work at it, practicing daily, you can enable your body to do things that are utterly impossible to an untrained physic. — 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

Each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. — Karen Armstrong

There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role models and give us precise moral teaching, but this was not the intention of the biblical authors. The Eden story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race. — 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

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

Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity. — Karen Armstrong

We want to create, never mind the leaders or the bishops or chief rabbis or imams, or Popes. We want to create a grassroots movement where people will become attuned to uncompassionate discourse in the same way as we are now attuned to sort of gender imbalance in our speech. — Karen Armstrong

Huge imbalance in power has resulted in the alienation, rage, fury, and awful amoral terrorism that has erupted and is erupting at the present time. And in order to counter this, we need to make the compassionate voice of religion and morality a dynamic force in our world. — Karen Armstrong

The great genius of the Shiah was its tragic perception that it is impossible fully to implement the ideals of religion in the inescapably violent realm of politics. — Karen Armstrong

If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role. — Karen Armstrong

Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being
whoever he or she may be
is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery. — Karen Armstrong

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of the selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred. And it gives us ecstasy, broadening our perspectives and giving us a larger, enhanced vision. — Karen Armstrong

The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion. It would always be possible to make these scriptures endorse intolerant policies. — Karen Armstrong

Human beings have always been mythmakers. — 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

In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression. — Karen Armstrong

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

A person who is impartial, fair, calm, gentle, serene, accepting, and openhearted is indeed a refuge. — Karen Armstrong

What seems wrong to you is right for him
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
These mean nothing to Me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It's all praise, and it's all right.
It's not I that's glorified in acts of worship.
It's the worshippers! I don't hear
the words they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be Friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression! — Karen Armstrong

We are meaning-seeking creatures. — Karen Armstrong

Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way. — Karen Armstrong

Ashoka's dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace. — Karen Armstrong

Compassion has to become a discipline. It's something that you do. It's no good thinking that you agree with compassion or not, you've just got to do it. Just like it's no good agreeing that it's possible to float, you just have to get into the pool and then you learn that it's possible. — Karen Armstrong

Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence. — 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

We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at a physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself. — Karen Armstrong

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

This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence the furor occasioned by The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin. The book was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober exploration of a scientific hypothesis. But because by this time people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual, many Christians felt
and still feel
that the whole edifice of faith was in jeopardy. 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. — Karen Armstrong

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. — Karen Armstrong

Trade and religion were thus inextricably combined in Mecca. The pilgrimage to Mecca was the climax of the suq cycle, and the Quraysh reconstructed the cult and architecture of the sanctuary so that it became a spiritual center for all the Arab tribes. Even though the Bedouin were not much interested in the gods, each tribe had its own presiding deity, usually represented by a stone effigy. The Quraysh collected the totems of the tribes that belonged to their confederacy and installed them in the Haram so that the tribesmen could only worship their patronal deities when they visited Mecca. The sanctity of the Kabah was thus essential to the success and survival of the Quraysh, and their competitors understood this. — Karen Armstrong

Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God - al-Dhat - is feminine. — Karen Armstrong

As soon as I stopped trying to exploit my literary skills to advance my career or enhance my reputation, I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself to the beauty of the words and in the wisdom of the writer. It was a kind of ekstasis, an ecstasy that was not an exotic, tranced state of consciousness but, in the literal sense of the word, a going beyond self. — Karen Armstrong

We are trying to retrain our responses and form mental habits that are kinder, gentler, and less fearful of others. — Karen Armstrong

But the state had no jurisdiction over the conscience of the individual and no right, therefore, to fight heresy or lead a holy war. While it could have nothing to do with the spiritual realm, the state must have unqualified and absolute authority in temporal affairs. Even if the state were cruel, tyrannical, and forbade the teaching of God's word, Christians must not resist its power.37 For its part, the true church, the Kingdom of God, must hold aloof from the inherently corrupt and depraved policies of the Kingdom of the World, dealing only with spiritual affairs. Protestants believed that the Roman Church had failed in its true mission because it had dallied with the sinful Kingdom of the World. — Karen Armstrong

In the eleventh century, a Jerusalem rabbi still recalled with gratitude the mercy God had shown his people when he allowed the "Kingdom of Ishmael" to conquer Palestine. — 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

Muhammad had close links with three of the leading hanifs of Mecca. 'Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was his cousin and Waraqah ibn Nawfal was a cousin of Khadijah: both these men became Christians. — Karen Armstrong

I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time. — Karen Armstrong

Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder. — Karen Armstrong

Politics had never been central to the Christian religious experience. Jesus had, after all, said that his Kingdom was not of this world. For centuries, the Jews of Europe had refrained from political involvement as a matter of principle. But politics was no secondary issue for Muslims. We have seen that it had been the theatre of their religious quest. Salvation did not mean redemption from sin, but the creation of a just society in which the individual could more easily make that existential surrender of his or her whole being that would bring fulfilment. The polity was therefore a matter of supreme importance, — Karen Armstrong