Top 200 Karen Armstrong Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.”

— Karen Armstrong

152. “The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egoism I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you.”

— Karen Armstrong

153. “The word qur’an means “recitation.” It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear.”

— Karen Armstrong

154. “So, we think about God far to easily and that’s because of a lot of social, intellectual, and scientific changes that have taken place in the western world and that has made God very problematic for a lot of people.”

— Karen Armstrong

155. “We have to make a disciplined effort to find out what our governments are doing in these various parts of the world and what is actually happening. We have to learn to listen to each other’s stories. Something we are not very good at.”

— Karen Armstrong

156. “The Qur’an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet’s heart, but it was resolutely opposed by many men in the ummah, including some of his closest companions.”

— Karen Armstrong

157. “Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives “without provocation” – a procedure normally unlawful – because they had not only a natural right to their territory, but “a special Commission from God” to take their land.19 Already there were signs of the exceptionalist thinking that would in the future often characterize American politics.”

— Karen Armstrong

158. “Often when religious leaders come together, they talk about a particular sexual ethic, or an abstruse doctrine, as though this, rather than compassion, was the test of spiritual life.”

— Karen Armstrong

159. “As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do everything we can to free them from their pain.”

— Karen Armstrong

160. “But during the nineteenth century, Europe was reconfigured into clearly defined states ruled by a central government.”

— Karen Armstrong

161. “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.”

— Karen Armstrong

162. “There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour.”

— Karen Armstrong

163. “After his death, his followers decided that Jesus had been divine. This did not happen immediately; as we shall see, the doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalized until the fourth century.”

— Karen Armstrong

164. “In any previous empire the religion of the ruling class had always been distinct from the faith of the subjugated masses, so the Christian emperors’ attempt to impose their theology on their subjects was a shocking break with precedent and was experienced as an outrage.”

— Karen Armstrong

165. “Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings.”

— Karen Armstrong

166. “The rationalism of Plato and Aristotle is also important because Jews, Christians and Muslims all drew upon their ideas and tried to adapt them to their own religious experience, even though the Greek God was very different from their own.”

— Karen Armstrong

167. “Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity.”

— Karen Armstrong

168. “One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen.”

— Karen Armstrong

169. “Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression.”

— Karen Armstrong

170. “The unity of God could be glimpsed in the truly integrated self.”

— Karen Armstrong

171. “When these early people looked at a stone, they did not see an inert, unpromising rock. It embodied strength, permanence, solidity and an absolute mode of being that was quite different from the vulnerable human state. Its very otherness made it holy.”

— Karen Armstrong

172. “The Buddha did not deny the gods, therefore, but believed that the ultimate Reality of nirvana was higher than the gods. When Buddhists experience bliss or a sense of transcendence in meditation, they do not believe that this results from contact with a supernatural being. Such states are natural to humanity; they can be attained by anybody who lives in the correct way and learns the techniques of Yoga. Instead of relying on a god, therefore, the Buddha urged his disciples to save themselves.”

— Karen Armstrong

173. “Yet the study of the Koran revealed that Muhammad himself had had a universal vision and had insisted that all rightly guided religions came from God.”

— Karen Armstrong

174. “Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.”

— Karen Armstrong

175. “Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained: The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one’s own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price.”

— Karen Armstrong

176. “Paul’s letters were occasional responses to specific questions rather than a coherent account of a fully articulated theology.”

— Karen Armstrong

177. “The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings.”

— Karen Armstrong

178. “In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively.”

— Karen Armstrong

179. “Culture was felt to be a fragile achievement, which could always fall prey to the forces of disorder and disintegration.”

— Karen Armstrong

180. “This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque.”

— Karen Armstrong

181. “Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to.”

— Karen Armstrong

182. “Humanism is itself a religion without God – not all religions, of course, are theistic.”

— Karen Armstrong

183. “St. Paul, the earliest Christian writer, who created the religion that we now know as Christianity, believed that Jesus had replaced the Torah as God’s principal revelation of himself to the world.”

— Karen Armstrong

184. “But Enki wants to save Atrahasis,50 the ‘exceedingly wise man’ of the city of Shuruppak.”

— Karen Armstrong

185. “There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.”

— Karen Armstrong

186. “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

187. “This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related.”

— Karen Armstrong

188. “The Sufis, the Sunni mystics with whom the Ismailis felt great affinity, had an axiom: “He who knows himself, knows his Lord.”

— Karen Armstrong

189. “Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the “numinous” was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior.”

— Karen Armstrong

190. “In a theologian such as Lessius we can see that as Europe approached modernity, the theologians themselves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little religious value and who filled many people with fear rather than with hope and faith.”

— Karen Armstrong

191. “As one Rabbi put it, “God does not come to man oppressively but commensurately with a man’s power of receiving him.”82 This very important rabbinic insight meant that God could not be described in a formula as though he were the same for everybody: he was an essentially subjective experience. Each individual would experience the reality of “God” in a different way to answer the needs of his or her own particular temperament.”

— Karen Armstrong

192. “In very early religion, therefore, creativity was seen as divine: we still use religious language to speak of creative “inspiration” which shapes reality anew and brings fresh meaning to the world.”

— Karen Armstrong

193. “Theism is so confused and the sentences in which ‘God’ appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.” 2 Atheism is as unintelligible and meaningless as theism. There is nothing in the concept of “God” to deny or be skeptical about.”

— Karen Armstrong

194. “Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way.”

— Karen Armstrong

195. “The texts emphasize that these ideas were not to be interpreted literally. They had nothing to do with ordinary logic or events in this world, but were merely symbols of a more elusive truth.”

— Karen Armstrong

196. “Indeed, God is dependent upon man when he wants to act in the world – an idea that would become very important in the Jewish conception of the divine. There are even hints that human beings can discern the activity of God in their own emotions and experiences, that Yahweh is part of the human condition.”

— Karen Armstrong

197. “Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done.”

— Karen Armstrong

198. “Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God,” like the other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism.”

— Karen Armstrong

199. “Thomas Aquinas may have given the impression that God was just another item – albeit the highest – in the chain of being, but he had personally been convinced that these philosophical arguments bore no relation to the mystical God he had experienced in prayer. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leading theologians and churchmen continued to argue the existence of God on entirely rational grounds.”

— Karen Armstrong

200. “Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately. When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody – not even the gods – could understand the mystery of existence:.”

— Karen Armstrong