Quotes from Karen Armstrong

What do you think Socrates meant when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Third

Perhaps the central paradox of the religious life is that it seeks transcendence, a dimension of existence that goes beyond our mundane lives, but that human beings can only experience this transcendent reality in earthly, physical phenomena.

we rarely convey our thoughts adequately to others and this makes our relationships with other people problematic.

advocates of evolutionary theory since Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) have found altruism problematic.

All religious people in any age have to make their traditions address the challenge of their particular modernity

In your mindfulness practice, notice how often, without thinking, you try to manipulate, control, or exploit others—sometimes in tiny and apparently unimportant ways.

Instead of engaging in uncharitable controversies, in which everybody insisted that he alone was right, a humble acknowledgement of our lack of insight should draw us together.

The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his ignorance, there was no way that anybody could win. Plato

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment.

Augustine was not a linguist. He knew no Hebrew and could not have encountered Jewish midrash, but he had come to the same conclusion as Hillel and Akiba. Any interpretation of scripture that spread hatred and dissension was illegitimate; all exegesis must be guided by the principle of charity.

man of the Axial Age, Confucius wanted people to become fully conscious of what they were doing. Performance of the li was

Si te consideras sabio, aseguraban, ¡puedes dar prácticamente por seguro que no lo eres!

He insisted that it was impossible to understand a single word of the Book of Nature without knowing the language of mathematics.

Compassion has dropped so far out of sight these days that many are confused about what is required. It even inspires overt hostility.

In the West, we have deliberately excluded religion from political life and regard faith as an essentially private activity. But this is a modern development, dating only to the eighteenth century, and would have been incomprehensible to both Jesus and Paul.

A double standard, albeit unintended, violates our integrity and damages our credibility. In a global society, conflict is rarely the fault of only one party.

Jesus's demonstration in the temple was not, as is often assumed, a plea for a more spiritual form of worship. As he rampaged through the money changers' stalls, he quoted the Hebrew prophets who had harsh words for those who were punctilious in their devotions but ignored the plight of the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.

Where establishment Islam was becoming less tolerant, seeing the Quran as the only valid scripture and Muhammad's religion as the one true faith, Sufis went back to the spirit of the Quran in their appreciation of other religious traditions. Some, for example, were especially devoted to Jesus, whom they saw as the ideal Sufi since he had preached a gospel of love.

And how could I hope to sense God's presence when I continually broke the silence, frequently had uncharitable thoughts, and above all, constantly yearned for human affection and wept when reprimanded?

The hanifs had little impact on their contemporaries, because they were chiefly concerned with their own personal salvation. They had no desire to reform the social or moral life of Arabia, and their theology was essentially negative. Instead of creating something new, they simply withdrew from the mainstream. Indeed the word hanif may derive from the root HNF: "to turn away from." They had a clearer idea of what they did not want than a positive conception of where they were going.

When people are consistently treated with the utmost respect, they learn to feel worthy of reverence; they realize that they have absolute value. So

Our neocortex has made us meaning-seeking creatures, acutely aware of the perplexity and tragedy of our predicament, and if we do not discover some ultimate significance in our lives, we fall easily into despair.

When these impoverished, indebted folk asked him what they should do, he told them to share what little they had with those who were even worse off—an ethic that would become central to Jesus's movement: "Whoever has two shirts must share with him who has none, and whoever has food must do the same."12

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.1