Karen Armstrong quotes

Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator, renowned for her works on comparative religion. Her writings explore the common threads and differences among major world faiths. She has received international recognition for promoting interfaith dialogue and understanding. Here are 107 of her quotes:

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

Karen Armstrong

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence.

Karen Armstrong

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

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

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

Compassion is not a popular virtue.

Karen Armstrong

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

Karen Armstrong

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

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

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

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

He was decisive and wholehearted in everything he did, so intent non 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 dress 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

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

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

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

I say that 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

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

Geniuses are not always pleasant people.

Karen Armstrong

Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate.

Karen Armstrong

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

Karen Armstrong

I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.

Karen Armstrong

We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.

Karen Armstrong