110+ Karen Armstrong Quotes On Religion, Education And Bible

Karen Armstrong is an English writer and commentator who focuses on religious affairs. She is a former Roman Catholic nun who has written extensively on the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Armstrong is best known for her book A History of God, which explores the relationship between religion and spirituality. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Karen Armstrong on religion, education, life.

Top 10 Karen Armstrong Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Compassion is not an option. It's the key to our survival.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. ...there is something wrong with any spirituality that does not inspire selfless concern for others
8. A mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms.
9. God [is] not the exclusive property of any one tradition. The divine light [cannot] be confined to a single lamp, belonging to the East or the West, but enlightens all human beings.
10. Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

Karen Armstrong Short Quotes

• The great task of our time is to build a global society, where people can live together in peace
• There must be no coercion in matters of faith!
• You are your best self when you give yourself away.
• I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.
• Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.
• We are what we are because of the hard work, insights and achievements of countless others.
• Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.
• My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.
• Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.
• I think I get from my books what other people get from family or a relationship or from prayer.

Karen Armstrong Quotes About Religion

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

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

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

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. — Karen Armstrong

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. — Karen Armstrong

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. — Karen Armstrong

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

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

Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong. — Karen Armstrong

We can't say what God is, and until the modern period, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians in the three God religions all knew that. They insisted that we have no idea what we meant when we said that God was good, or wise, or intelligent. — Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong Quotes About Life

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

there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death. — Karen Armstrong

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

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

Far from being the father of jihad, [Prophet] Mohammad was a peacemaker, who risked his life and nearly lost the loyalty of his closest companions because he was determined to effect a reconciliation with Mecca — Karen Armstrong

I'm seeking to make sense of life, looking for its meaning and how we can have a better humanity. — Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong Quotes About Compassion

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. — Karen Armstrong

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort. — Karen Armstrong

Compassion is not a popular virtue. — Karen Armstrong

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

When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world. — Karen Armstrong

Religions don't own compassion; it is a human virtue. — Karen Armstrong

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

[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68) — Karen Armstrong

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

The early doctrines of the church, even doctrines like Trinity and Incarnation were originally also calls for action, calls for selflessness, calls for compassion, and unless you live that out compassionately, selflessly, you didn't understand what the doctrine was saying. — Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong Quotes About Religious

From the Muslims I learned from the extraordinary pluralism of the Koran, the fact that the Koran endorses every single one of the major world faiths, but I was particularly enthralled by the Sufi tradition, the mystical tradition of Islam, which is so open to other religious faiths. — Karen Armstrong

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

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

If professional religious leaders can [no longer] instruct..., our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world. — Karen Armstrong

It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing. — Karen Armstrong

Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East - the slagging off of a whole religious tradition. — Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong Quotes About Islam

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. — Karen Armstrong

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

There is nothing in Islam that is more violent than Christianity. — Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong Quotes About Christianity

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

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

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

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God's transcendence. — Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong Quotes About World

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

Let us bring something new to the table. Let us use our pain always to remember the others, bring them into the conversation, and get beyond the stereotypes and prejudices that create injustice all over the world. — Karen Armstrong

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

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

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

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

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

I am continually trying to find meaning in the world. If we cannot find some ultimate significance or value in our lives, we fall very easily into despair. — Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong Famous Quotes And Sayings

If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. — Karen Armstrong

Every single one of the major world faiths, whether we're talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have all come to the conclusion that what holds us back from our better self is ego, selfishness, greed, unkindness, hatred. And it all springs from a sense of thwarted ego. — Karen Armstrong

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. — Karen Armstrong

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

Compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism. — Karen Armstrong

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

Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity. — Karen Armstrong

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

My greatest solace is my study. If I am deprived of my study, I can become lost, unhappy and unhinged. — Karen Armstrong

Saint Augustine ... insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity. — Karen Armstrong

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

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

Intelligence doesn't just mean tracking down terrorists; It means finding out what is in people's hearts and minds and discovering the complexity of most issues. — Karen Armstrong

We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter. — Karen Armstrong

I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing. — Karen Armstrong

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God. — Karen Armstrong

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

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

He [Aristotle] pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts 'but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.' Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth. — Karen Armstrong

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

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

Sometimes I call myself a freelance, I can't see any one of the great religions as superior to others. — Karen Armstrong

I left the convent and that was because I wasn't a very good nun. I could see that I wasn't going to make it. It's very difficult to be a nun, or to live a religious life. It's very difficult to live a life of total celibacy or a life without any possessions or material responsibilities at all, or in total obedience to somebody else, and remain a mature whole human being, and I knew that I wasn't going to be one of those. — Karen Armstrong

He was decisive and wholehearted in everything he did, so intent on the task at hand that he never looked over his shoulder, even if his cloak got caught in a thorny bush. When he did turn to speak to somebody, he used to swing his entire body and address him full face. When he shook hands, he was never the first to withdraw his own. He inspired such confidence that he was known as al-Amin, the Reliable One. — Karen Armstrong

Illness itself can make you angry, enraged, furious, and it made me angry, enraged, and furious. I don't think it brought me to God at all. It depends how you deal with it. And I think that, at its best, three little words that always have to be applied to religion, religion can help you to deal with that. — Karen Armstrong

I never intended to be a historian of religion. My aim was to become a professor of English Literature in a university, but I had a series of absolute career disasters and found myself making television programs about the nature of religion and about Christian history and started to discover about other religious traditions, and that was an absolute eye-opener for me. — Karen Armstrong

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. — Karen Armstrong

You know how it is in the symphony when you are listening to the symphony, the last notes die away, and there's often a beat of silence in the auditorium before the applause begins. It's a very full and pregnant silence. Now theology should bring us to live into that silence, into that pregnant pause. — Karen Armstrong

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence. — Karen Armstrong

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

Yet while nature is in constant flux, we always go against the grain and try to freeze our ideas and experiences and make them absolute. It is egotism that makes us identify with one opinion rather than another, become quarrelsome and unkind, say *this* could not mean *that*, and think we have a duty to change others to suit ourselves. — Karen Armstrong

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of the selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred. And it gives us ecstasy, broadening our perspectives and giving us a larger, enhanced vision. — Karen Armstrong

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. — Karen Armstrong

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. — Karen Armstrong

Geniuses are not always pleasant people. — Karen Armstrong

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. The cross, crucified, and that turned into victory. Mohammad was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength. — Karen Armstrong

A science can diagnose a cancer and can even find a cure for it, but it can't, and a scientist will be the first to say, it's can't help you to deal with the stress and disappointment and terror that comes with a diagnosis, and nor can it help you to die well, like Socrates, kindly, not railing against faith, but in possession of your own death. For these imponderable questions people have turned to mythos. — Karen Armstrong

I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible, as Marshall Hodgson enjoined, to find room for the other in our minds. If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant. — Karen Armstrong

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

We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind. — Karen Armstrong

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

We are opinionated society. We're very happy to spout forth our own views; we're not good about listening. We have to listen to other's stories. Learn to listen to the stories of the terrorists just as we hope that they will listen to ours because very often these narratives express frustrations, fears, and anxieties that most societies can safely ignore. — Karen Armstrong

The study of the traditions doesn't necessarily make you want to convert to another tradition, but it helps you to see your own differently and expands your outlook. — Karen Armstrong

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

The more aggressive our ideologies become, the more aggressive our discourse whether it's in the United States, from Washington D.C., or whether it's from Tehran, or from some underground Al-Qaeda cell. The more aggressive that discourse is, the more people of moderate persuasion have to organize and speak a voice of compassion. That means to feel with the other. — Karen Armstrong

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

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

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

Important thing about myth is that it's not just something that you believe, a myth is essentially a program for action. And unless you translate a mythical story, or a doctrine out of the church, into practical action, it just remains incomprehensible. Rather like the rules of a board game which seem very sort of dull and complicated and incomprehensible until you pick up the dice and start to play, when everything falls into place. — Karen Armstrong

I used to hate religion, I loathed it in my angry days. — Karen Armstrong

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

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

Life Lessons by Karen Armstrong

1. Karen Armstrong emphasizes the importance of understanding and compassion in her writing, teaching us that we must strive to understand each other and ourselves before we can truly move forward.
2. She also encourages us to be open to different perspectives and to embrace our own spiritual journey, reminding us that we are all connected and that we should strive to be tolerant of each other's beliefs and differences.
3. Finally, Armstrong's writing encourages us to be mindful of our actions, to think before we speak, and to take responsibility for our own lives and the lives of those around us.