Top 200 Karen Armstrong Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”

— Karen Armstrong

2. “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

3. “Compassion is not an option. It’s the key to our survival.”

— Karen Armstrong

4. “Each of the world religions has its own particular genius, its own special insight into the nature and requirements of compassion, and has something unique to teach us.”

— Karen Armstrong

5. “If we could view Muhammad as we do any other important historical figure we would surely consider him to be one of the greatest geniuses the world has known.”

— Karen Armstrong

6. “Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.”

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

8. “Religions don’t own compassion; it is a human virtue.”

— Karen Armstrong

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Karen Armstrong

12. “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

13. “Some people simply bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about the sorrow of the world, but this is an unwise course, because, if we are entirely unprepared, the tragedy of life can be devastating.”

— Karen Armstrong

14. “Religion isn’t about believing things. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.”

— Karen Armstrong

15. “Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.”

— Karen Armstrong

16. “Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.”

— Karen Armstrong

17. “The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The.”

— Karen Armstrong

18. “Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus.”

— Karen Armstrong

19. “When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.”

— Karen Armstrong

20. “Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It’s not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.”

— Karen Armstrong

21. “It’s quite common for a Sufi mystic to cry in ecstasy that he’s neither a Jew, a Christian, nor a Muslim. He is at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, or a church because when one’s glimpsed the divine, one’s left these man-made distinctions behind.”

— Karen Armstrong

22. “You are your best self when you give yourself away.”

— Karen Armstrong

23. “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

24. “You have to get into the water and learn against what seems to be the law gravity to float and dancing, or athletics takes you years before you develop a skill. But if you work at it, practicing daily, you can enable your body to do things that are utterly impossible to an untrained physic.”

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

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26. “And so, one of the reasons why I started my Charter for Compassion, was to bring the Golden Rule back to the center of religion and morality and not put other’s secondary goals, less demand goals, into the forefront.”

— Karen Armstrong

27. “Surely it’s better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one’s capacity for love to harden.”

— Karen Armstrong

28. “Let’s use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people’s stories and histories.”

— Karen Armstrong

29. “We are meaning-seeking creatures.”

— Karen Armstrong

30. “Geniuses are not always pleasant people.”

— Karen Armstrong

31. “There must be no coercion in matters of faith!”

— Karen Armstrong

32. “Compassion is not a popular virtue.”

— Karen Armstrong

33. “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.”

— Karen Armstrong

34. “We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our.”

— Karen Armstrong

35. “Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne “Holy Roman Emperor” in the Basilica of St. Peter. The congregation acclaimed him as “Augustus,” and Leo prostrated himself at Charlemagne’s feet.”

— Karen Armstrong

36. “Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong.”

— Karen Armstrong

37. “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

38. “If your child dies, or you witness a terrible natural disaster, yes, you certainly want a scientific explanation as to what’s happened. But science can’t help you to find meaning, help you deal with that turbulence of your grief, rage, and dismay.”

— Karen Armstrong

39. “When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.”

— Karen Armstrong

40. “If we don’t manage to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, wherever and whoever they may be, as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we’ll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.”

— Karen Armstrong

41. “We have seen that, like the weather, religion “does lots of different things.” To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action.”

— Karen Armstrong

42. “One day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with betrayal and cruelty. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problems of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over, it was time for the evening prayer.”

— Karen Armstrong

43. “Tiamat, Mot and Leviathan are not evil, but are simply fulfilling their cosmic role. They have to die and endure dismemberment before an ordered cosmos can emerge from chaos.”

— Karen Armstrong

44. “The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.”

— Karen Armstrong

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

— Karen Armstrong

46. “You put yourself in the receptive frame of mind with which we approach music or poetry, which you can measure the difference on a neurological scanner.”

— Karen Armstrong

47. “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

48. “A mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms.”

— Karen Armstrong

49. “In order to always treat others, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we have to learn about each other. Not just relying on an op-ed piece we may have read here, or a half-remembered interview on the television program there that happens to chime with our own views.”

— Karen Armstrong

50. “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