Top 200 Karen Armstrong Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.”

— Karen Armstrong

52. “We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.”

— Karen Armstrong

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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.”

— Karen Armstrong

56. “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

57. “When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is really there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again.”

— Karen Armstrong

58. “Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.”

— Karen Armstrong

59. “Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace.”

— Karen Armstrong

60. “We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world.”

— Karen Armstrong

61. “Huge imbalance in power has resulted in the alienation, rage, fury, and awful amoral terrorism that has erupted and is erupting at the present time. And in order to counter this, we need to make the compassionate voice of religion and morality a dynamic force in our world.”

— Karen Armstrong

62. “I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.”

— Karen Armstrong

63. “The trouble with a lot of modern theology and a lot of modern thinking about God, is that we think of God a sort of being like ourselves, but bigger and better with likes and dislikes similar to our own.”

— Karen Armstrong

64. “Religion is a practical discipline and in the 17th century in the West, we turned it onto a head trip. But it’s like dancing, or swimming, or driving, which you can’t learn by texts. You have to get into the car and learn how to manipulate the vehicle.”

— Karen Armstrong

65. “Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice.”

— Karen Armstrong

66. “Here in America, religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They’ve lost the Axial Age vision of concern for everybody.”

— Karen Armstrong

67. “The great genius of the Shiah was its tragic perception that it is impossible fully to implement the ideals of religion in the inescapably violent realm of politics.”

— Karen Armstrong

68. “Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.”

— Karen Armstrong

69. “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

70. “There is nothing in Islam that is more violent than Christianity.”

— Karen Armstrong

71. “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

72. “A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists, attribute their insights.”

— Karen Armstrong

73. “In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do.”

— Karen Armstrong

74. “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.”

— Karen Armstrong

75. “Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.”

— Karen Armstrong

76. “Another peculiar characteristic of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that we cannot explain rationally. We have imagination, a faculty that enables us to think of something that is not immediately present, and that, when we first conceive it, has no objective existence. The imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology.”

— Karen Armstrong

77. “We want to create, never mind the leaders or the bishops or chief rabbis or imams, or Popes. We want to create a grassroots movement where people will become attuned to uncompassionate discourse in the same way as we are now attuned to sort of gender imbalance in our speech.”

— Karen Armstrong

78. “If we try to hold on to our partial glimpses of the divine, we cut it down to our own size and close our minds. Like it or nor, our human experience of anything or anybody is always incomplete: there is usually something that eludes us, some portion of experience that evades our grasp.”

— Karen Armstrong

79. “Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves.”

— Karen Armstrong

80. “I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.”

— Karen Armstrong

81. “My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I.”

— Karen Armstrong

82. “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

83. “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

84. “Compassion asks us to look into our hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse to inflict that pain on anybody else.”

— Karen Armstrong

85. “Even our contemporary cult of celebrity can be understood as an expression of our reverence for and yearning to emulate models of “superhumanity.” Feeling ourselves connected to such extraordinary.”

— Karen Armstrong

86. “Religion is a practical discipline and it’s one that we have always done, ever since humanity appeared on the scene when Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens. Sapiens became a human being, our minds very naturally segue into transcendence.”

— Karen Armstrong

87. “Mythology is usually inseparable from ritual.”

— Karen Armstrong

88. “Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders.”

— Karen Armstrong

89. “We constantly have ideas and experiences that go beyond what we can say or know. Most often these are expressed in art, in painting, in music. Music, everyday confronts us with a form of knowing that doesn’t depend on words.”

— Karen Armstrong

90. “Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.”

— Karen Armstrong

91. “People still dreamed of going on Crusade and liberating Jerusalem, but in an important development, holy warfare was beginning to merge with the patriotism of national war.”

— Karen Armstrong

92. “There is a linguistic connection between the three words “myth,” “mysticism” and “mystery.” All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence.”

— Karen Armstrong

93. “We talk about God as though he was like a somebody. We ask him to bless our nation, or save our Queen, or give us a fine day for the picnic. And we actually expect him to be on our side in an election or war even though our opponents are also God’s children.”

— Karen Armstrong

94. “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

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

— Karen Armstrong

96. “We are what we are because of the hard work, insights and achievements of countless others.”

— Karen Armstrong

97. “Krishna explains. “When enemies become too numerous and powerful, they should be slain by deceit and stratagems. This was the path formerly trodden by the devas to slay the asuras; and a path trodden by the virtuous may be trodden by all.”

— Karen Armstrong

98. “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

99. “Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50.”

— Karen Armstrong

100. “Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.”

— Karen Armstrong