Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders. "
Karen Armstrong
Alas
Purity
Traditions
Related Quotes:
" The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight. "
Karen Armstrong
Islam
Changed
World
" Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way. "
Karen Armstrong
Sorry
People
Feeling
" 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? "
Karen Armstrong
People
Look
Compassion
" Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God. "
Karen Armstrong
Describe
Much
Nirvana
" Well, the idea of God as a supreme being means that he is simply like us, writ large, and just bigger and better, the end product of the series; whereas this divine personality that we meet in the Bible was, for centuries, regarded simply as a symbol of a greater transcendence that lay beyond it. "
Karen Armstrong
Personality
Better
God
" 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 went around doing good and being compassionate. "
Karen Armstrong
Good
Great
Doing
" 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
Success
Death
Dying
" 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
Islam
Out
Principles
" The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ. "
Karen Armstrong
Years
Rule
Person
" 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
Peaceful
Life
Compassion
" Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. "
Karen Armstrong
Search
Religion
External
" Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective. "
Karen Armstrong
New
Today
Knowledge
" We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity. "
Karen Armstrong
Identity
Egotism
Depend
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Train
Book
Think
" 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
Ego
Want
Religion
" Human beings have always been mythmakers. "
Karen Armstrong
Always
Human
Been
" 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 spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place. "
Karen Armstrong
Compassion
Place
Goals
" 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
More
Change
God
" 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 this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it. "
Karen Armstrong
Science
See
Technology
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Value
Fall
Beginning
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
God
Thoughts
Words
" Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage. "
Karen Armstrong
God
Yes
Stage
" 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
Good
Listening
Pain
" I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time. "
Karen Armstrong
Men
Nothing
Time
" 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
Why
Think
Way
" 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
Sex
Religion
Cooking
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Intellectual
Love
Beginning
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
City
Home
Angry
" I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle. "
Karen Armstrong
Very
Impatient
Sharp
" Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day. "
Karen Armstrong
Knowledge
Day
Compassion