Karen Armstrong Quotes - Page 4

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

  Karen Armstrong

  Buddhist, Term

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• I'm seeking to make sense of life, looking for its meaning and how we can have a better humanity.

  Karen Armstrong

  Humanity, Make Sense, Seeking

  "Sally Quinn on Author Karen Armstrong". Interview with Sally Quinn, www.washingtonpost.com. March 29, 2006.

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• Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears.

  Karen Armstrong

  Nice, Atheism, Desire

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• Deeds that seemed unimportant at the time would prove to have been momentous; a tiny act of selfishness and unkindness or, conversely, an unconsidered act of generosity would become the measure of a human life.

  Karen Armstrong

  Generosity, Selfishness, Deeds

  "Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet". Book by Karen Armstrong, 2001.

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• Religions have found that if you behave in a certain way, if you sort of perform certain rituals that expand your mind and make you realize that will make you realize and help you to seguey into transcendence and perform certain acts, adopt a certain lifestyle, you develop new capacities of mind and heart, just like the dancer, or the athlete that make you into a whole human being and principle after one of these disciplines right across the board in all of the faiths is compassion, the ability to feel with the other person.

  Karen Armstrong

  Athlete, Heart, Compassion

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• Even though the discples were not aware of it, the presence was with them while they were reviewing the scriptures together on the road. Henceforth, we will catch only a fleeting glimpse of it -- in the study of sacred writings, in other human beings, in liturgy, and in communion with strangers. But these moments remain us that our fellow men and women are themselves sacred; there is something about them taht is worthy of absolute reverence, is in the last resort mysterious, and we will always elude us.

  Karen Armstrong

  Writing, Men, Elude Us

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• 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

  Depressing, Fall, Despair

  Karen Armstrong (2004). “A Short History Of Myth”, p.2, Canongate Books

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• And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

  Karen Armstrong

  Religious, Giving, Selfishness

  "Now" with Bill Moyers, www.pbs.org.

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• We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

  Karen Armstrong

  Creative, Ordinary, Possibility

  Karen Armstrong (2010). “The Spiral Staircase”, p.313, Vintage Canada

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• Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

  Karen Armstrong

  Religion, Twenties, Breakfast

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• Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

  Karen Armstrong

  Art, Effort, Creative

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• A gentleman is not born but crafted. He had to work on himself in the same way as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.

  Karen Armstrong

  Gentleman, Stones, Way

  Karen Armstrong (2011). “The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah”, p.202, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• 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

  Fundamentalist Religion, Islam, Wiping Out

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• Compassion is not a popular virtue

  Karen Armstrong

  Compassion, Virtue

  Karen Armstrong (2011). “The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah”, p.378, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.

  Karen Armstrong

  Religious, Killing, Difficult

  Karen Armstrong (2006). “The great transformation: the beginning of our religious traditions”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• 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

  Home, Cities, Discipline

  "Prejudices about Islam will be shaken by this show" by Karen Armstrong, www.theguardian.com. January 22, 2012.

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• Compassion has to become a discipline. It's something that you do. It's no good thinking that you agree with compassion or not, you've just got to do it. Just like it's no good agreeing that it's possible to float, you just have to get into the pool and then you learn that it's possible.

  Karen Armstrong

  Thinking, Compassion, Discipline

  "Big Think Interview With Karen Armstrong". Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• I am continually trying to find meaning in the world. If we cannot find some ultimate significance or value in our lives, we fall very easily into despair.

  Karen Armstrong

  Fall, Trying, Despair

  "A conversation with Karen Armstrong". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence.

  Karen Armstrong

  Religious, Practice, Ideas

  Karen Armstrong (2002). “Islam: A Short History”, Random House Digital, Inc.

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• Important thing about myth is that it's not just something that you believe, a myth is essentially a program for action. And unless you translate a mythical story, or a doctrine out of the church, into practical action, it just remains incomprehensible. Rather like the rules of a board game which seem very sort of dull and complicated and incomprehensible until you pick up the dice and start to play, when everything falls into place.

  Karen Armstrong

  Believe, Fall, Games

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• From the Rabbis of the early Talmudic age I learned that there is never a last word on God. There's, you always continue to question. Even God himself could be questioned and you can keep arguing with one another and there will be no end to this conversation about the divine because no human expression of God can be ultimate.

  Karen Armstrong

  Expression, Age, Lasts

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

  Karen Armstrong

  Self, Creative, Way

  Karen Armstrong (2010). “The Spiral Staircase”, p.313, Vintage Canada

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• My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.

  Karen Armstrong

  Art, Way, Study

  "A conversation with Karen Armstrong". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• 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

  Loyalty, Religious, Horse

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• God is not good, or wise, or intelligent anyway that we know. So, people like Maimonides in the Jewish tradition, Eboncina in the Muslim tradition, Thomas Aquinas in the Christian tradition, insisted that we couldn't even say that God existed because our concept of existence is far too limited and they would have been horrified by the ease with which we talk about God today.

  Karen Armstrong

  Christian, Wise, Intelligent

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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