Top 200 Karen Armstrong Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric, or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed. In.”

— Karen Armstrong

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Karen Armstrong

207. “Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline. Some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and some will miss the point entirely. But those who do not apply themselves will get nowhere at all. Religious people find it hard to explain how their rituals and practices work, just as a skater may not be fully conscious of the physical laws that enable her to glide over the ice on a thin blade.”

— Karen Armstrong

208. “Henceforth women were marginalized and became second-class citizens in the new civilizations of the Oikumene. Their position was particularly poor in Greece, for example – a fact that Western people should remember when they decry the patriarchal attitudes of the Orient.”

— Karen Armstrong

209. “Aristotle’s account of the Katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.”

— Karen Armstrong

210. “When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today.”

— Karen Armstrong

211. “Ultimately, however, he held that a person’s theology or beliefs, like the ritual he took part in, were unimportant. They could be interesting but not a matter of final significance. The only thing that counted was the good life;.”

— Karen Armstrong

212. “Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute. It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being. Such a God is likely to be more attractive and popular than the God of Amos and Isaiah, who demands ruthless self-criticism.”

— Karen Armstrong

213. “The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human.”

— Karen Armstrong

214. “The God who may have inspired the first successful peasants’ uprising in history is a God of revolution. In all three faiths, he has inspired an ideal of social justice, even though it has to be said that Jews, Christians and Muslims have often failed to live up to this ideal and have transformed him into the God of the status quo.”

— Karen Armstrong

215. “People who have been taught to despise themselves cannot easily respect others.”

— Karen Armstrong

216. “There was a growing conviction that religion had to become as rational as modern science.”

— Karen Armstrong

217. “Thus had been born the absurd type of apologetics that attempt to “prove” the veracity of the Bible by finding a rational explanation for the various miracles and myths. Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, for example, has been interpreted as his shaming people in the crowd to produce the picnics that they had surreptitiously brought with them and hand them around.”

— Karen Armstrong

218. “It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy and dread in the presence of a reality – called nirvana, the One, Brahman or God – seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are natural and endlessly sought by human beings.”

— Karen Armstrong

219. “A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before.”

— Karen Armstrong

220. “On 26 April 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Nazi planes, under the orders of General Franco, attacked the Basque capital of Guernica on its market-day, killing 1654 of its 7000 inhabitants. A few months later, Pablo Picasso exhibited Guernica at the International Exhibition in Paris. This modern, secular crucifixion shocked his contemporaries, and yet, like The Waste Land, it was a prophetic statement, and also a rallying cry against the inhumanity of our brave new world.”

— Karen Armstrong

221. “Yet the notion of Christ’s sacrificial death was similar to the ideal of the bodhisattva, which was developing at this time in India. Like the bodhisattva, Christ had, in effect, become a mediator between humanity and the Absolute, the difference being that Christ was the only mediator and the salvation he effected was not an unrealized aspiration for the future, like that of the bodhisattva, but a fait accompli.”

— Karen Armstrong

222. “Religious people prefer to be right rather than be compassionate.”

— Karen Armstrong

223. “Finally Muhammad quoted the words that God had spoken to the whole of humanity: Behold, we have created you all out of a male or a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you may come to know one another. Verily, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of him. Behold God is all-knowing, all-aware.40.”

— Karen Armstrong

224. “The people we hate haunt us; they inhabit our minds in a negative way as we brood in a deviant form of meditation on their bad qualities. The enemy thus becomes our twin, a shadow self whom we come to resemble.”

— Karen Armstrong

225. “The right to liberty was crucial: it is difficult to find a single reference to imprisonment in the whole of rabbinic literature, because only God can curtail the freedom of a human being. Spreading scandal about somebody was tantamount to denying the existence of God.104 Jews were not to think of God as a Big Brother, watching their every move from above; instead they were to cultivate a sense of God within each human being so that our dealings with others became sacred encounters.”

— Karen Armstrong

226. “We are a talkative and opinionated society and not always good at listening.”

— Karen Armstrong

227. “By rationalizing nature and confining God to the heavens, we have so drastically reduced the divine that for many it has become either incredible or imperceptible. At the same time, in our industrialized societies, we have been systematically destroying the natural order.”

— Karen Armstrong

228. “A journey to the depths of the mind involves great personal risks because we may not be able to endure what we find there. That is why all religions have insisted that the mystical journey can only be undertaken under the guidance of an expert, who can monitor the experience, guide the novice past the perilous places and make sure that he is not exceeding his strength, like poor Ben Azzai, who died, and Ben Zoma, who went mad. All mystics stress the need for intelligence and mental stability.”

— Karen Armstrong

229. “In his last impassioned speech, Stephen had claimed that the Temple was an insult to the nature of God: “The Most High does not live in a home that human hands have built.”

— Karen Armstrong

230. “Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.”

— Karen Armstrong

231. “Human beings seem framed to pose problems for themselves that they cannot solve, pit themselves against the dark world of uncreated reality, and find that living with such unknowing is a source of astonishment and delight.”

— Karen Armstrong

232. “Descartes’s argument turns out to be a reworking of Anselm’s Ontological Proof. When we doubt, the limitations and finite nature of the ego are revealed. Yet we could not arrive at the idea of “imperfection” if we did not have a prior conception of “perfection.” Like Anselm, Descartes concluded that a perfection that did not exist would be a contradiction in terms.”

— Karen Armstrong

233. “People would continue to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.”

— Karen Armstrong