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All Quotes by author - Karen Armstrong

" After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful. "

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

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

" A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do. "

" At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. "

" Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God. "

" But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value. "

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

" Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day. "

" Compassion is not a popular virtue. "

" 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, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people? "

" Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar. "

" 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. "

" 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 as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity. "

" Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion. "

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

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

" Human beings have always been mythmakers. "

" I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions. "

" I believe in holiness and sacredness in other people. It doesn't mean that the clouds part and I see God. That's a juvenile way of thinking about it. "

" If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we've got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life. "

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

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

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

" In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living. "

" In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do. "

" 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 past. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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