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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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? "

" The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

Karen Armstrong

Solitude

Lose

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

Karen Armstrong

Poetry

" 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. "

Karen Armstrong

Past

Fact

" 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. "

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

" We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester. "

" 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. "

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

" Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Religion

External

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

" 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

Change

God