Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Human beings have always been mythmakers. "
Karen Armstrong
Always
Human
Been
Related Quotes:
" 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
" I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time. "
Karen Armstrong
Men
Nothing
Time
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Today
Faith
Life
" Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar. "
Karen Armstrong
Similar
Compassion
Key
" All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering. "
Karen Armstrong
Religions
Teach
Us
" 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
" 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
" 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
Well
Success
Failure
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Religion
Islam
Liberal
" I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness. "
Karen Armstrong
Solitude
Lose
Like
" 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
" 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
" 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
Bald
See
Great
" I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions. "
Karen Armstrong
I Am
Ego
Losing
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Few
People
Nun
" 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
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Islam
People
Better
" 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
" 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
" 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
Me
Past
Fact
" 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
" 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
" Well, logos is science or reason, something that helps us to function practically and effectively in the world, and it must therefore be closely in tune and reflect accurately the realities of the world around us. "
Karen Armstrong
World
Reason
Us
" 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
" Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God. "
Karen Armstrong
Describe
Much
Nirvana