Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

You have to practice quite hard, like you do with any art form. Religion is hard work.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

There are some forms of religion that must make God weep.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

A project like Pangea, which enables us to enter in to the situations of others, imaginatively, is fulfilling what the religions call the Golden Rule…

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

Secularism has shown that it can be just as murderous, just as lethal … as religion.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

Some of them even said that the Europeans … were better Muslims than they themselves, because their modern society had enabled them to create a fairer and more just distribution of wealth, than was possible in their pre-modern climates, and that accorded more perfectly with the vision of the Quran.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

A lot of the arguments about religion going on at the moment spring from a rather inept understanding of religious truth

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

We can't even say that God exists because our notion of existence is too limited to apply to God.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

…Muhammad was one of those rare men who truly enjoy the company women. Some of his male companions were astonished by his leniency towards his wives and the way they stood up to him and answered him back. Muhammad scrupulously helped with the chores, mended his own clothes and sought out the companionship of his wives.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

This is where some of the worst atrocities of religion have come from. Because people have used [it] — to give a sacred seal of a divine approval to some of their most worst hatreds, loathings, and fears.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

You were at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple or a church, because all rightly guided religion comes from God, and a man of God, once he's glimpsed the divine, has left these man-made distinctions behind.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

All fundamentalist movements… whether they're Jewish, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist, all begin as an intra-religious debate, an intra-religious struggle.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

Compassion is not a popular virtue.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

Religion is really an art form and a struggle to find value and meaning amid the ghastly tragedy of human life.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong
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
Karen Armstrong

Geniuses are not always pleasant people.