Karen Armstrong Quotes

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we've got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life."

"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."

"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."

"Compassion is not a popular virtue."

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

"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."

"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."

"There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too."

"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."

"Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept."

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