Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
" Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders. "
Karen Armstrong
Alas
Purity
Traditions
" 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
" Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem. "
Karen Armstrong
Religion
Problem
Conflict
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Human
Life
Pain
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Compassion is not a popular virtue. "
Karen Armstrong
Compassion
Virtue
Popular
" 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
" Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar. "
Karen Armstrong
Similar
Compassion
Key
" 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
" Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day. "
Karen Armstrong
Knowledge
Day
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
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Off
Criticism
Doing
" I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle. "
Karen Armstrong
Very
Impatient
Sharp
" 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. "
Karen Armstrong
Violence
Religion
Your Dreams
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness. "
Karen Armstrong
Solitude
Lose
Like
" 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
" Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories. "
Karen Armstrong
Storytelling
You
Stories
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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