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Karen Armstrong

All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.

— Karen Armstrong religion

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 faith

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

— Karen Armstrong silence

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 life

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

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 religion

Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.

— Karen Armstrong passion

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 life

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 life

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 faith

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

— Karen Armstrong knowledge

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

— Karen Armstrong time

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 life

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

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 success

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 past

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 time

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

— Karen Armstrong life

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

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 religion

Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

— Karen Armstrong men

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 life

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

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 life

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 society

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they dont want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

— Karen Armstrong religion

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