Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight. "

Karen Armstrong

Related Quotes:

" 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

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

Karen Armstrong

" 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

" Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories. "

Karen Armstrong

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Karen Armstrong

" Human beings have always been mythmakers. "

Karen Armstrong

" Compassion is not a popular virtue. "

Karen Armstrong

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

" 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

" There is a danger in monotheism, and it's called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine. "

Karen Armstrong

" 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. "

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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