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Karen Armstrong Quotes

Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulge...

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Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some g...

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Well, logos is science or reason, something that helps us to function practically and effectively in...

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Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional appreh...

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

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god...

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Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarn...

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Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creeda...

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For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impul...

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Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how impo...

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Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious ener...

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We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber's targeting of innocent civilians and mourn hi...

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Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually,...

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I did not want to appear before the world as pathetic, deprssed, and psychologically ill. So I erect...

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Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a pr...

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A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism

By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His ...

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A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism

Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that yo...

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A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism

What seems wrong to you is right for himWhat is poison to one is honey to someone else.Purity and im...

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A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism

If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative ...

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A Short History of Myth

We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition...

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A Short History of Myth

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who be...

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A Short History of Myth

...a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a p...

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A Short History of Myth / The Penelopiad / Weight / Dream Angus

We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God but we cannot...

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Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and myst...

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Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It w...

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Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions... Qur'anic reciters chant long ph...

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Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time

In each of the early surahs, God spoke intimately to the individual, often preferring to pose many o...

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Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time

The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambi...

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The Case for God

In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become ...

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The Case for God

In [the] early days, Muslims did not see Islam as a new, exclusive religion but as a continuation of...

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The Case for God

Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius,...

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The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior w...

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and...

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid ...

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing thi...

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen ...

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sy...

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that...

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosi...

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Compassion dervies from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning "to suffer, undergo or exper...

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Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

Humiliate your enemy is dangerous.

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author m...

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[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (...

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Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (...

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Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

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

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When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and myst...

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Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims...

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Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give ...

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Karen Armstrong

Author

Born: 1944-11-14

Died: N/A

Karen Armstrong, FRSL (born 14 November 1944) is a British author and commentator of Irish Catholic descent known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and majored in English. She left the convent in 1969. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.More