Quotes by Karen Armstrong

About Karen Armstrong:

Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and majored in English. She became disillusioned and left the convent in 1969. She first rose to prominence in 1993 with her book A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Karen Armstrong

Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice: Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent ...

Karen Armstrong

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs. fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of...

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 wo...

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 bad religion too.

Karen Armstrong

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.

Karen Armstrong

...a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows ...

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 relig...

Karen Armstrong

When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is "really" there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond ...

Karen Armstrong

If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, ...

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egoism I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with ...

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...

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 , published by Charle...

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 dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily int...

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

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as...

Karen Armstrong

We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)

Karen Armstrong

Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of char...

Karen Armstrong

Compassion dervies from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning "to suffer, undergo or experience." So "compassion" means "to endure [something] with another person," to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, to feel her pain as though it we...

Karen Armstrong

Author Bio

  • NameKaren Armstrong
  • Descriptionauthor and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain
  • BornNovember 14, 1944
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionTheologian; Writer
  • AwardsFour Freedoms Award - Freedom Of Worship