Quotes from Karen Armstrong

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

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

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

Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.

Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.

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

All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.

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.

If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we've got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life.

A mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms.

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

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.

Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.

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

Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past.

The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.

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.

Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.