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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

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Karen Armstrong
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: November 14
Author
Historian Of Religion
Islamicist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
Success
Dazzling
Wells
Spiritually
Well
Apparent
Politically
Islam
Failure
Strength
Went
Mohammed

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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
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I like silence I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
Karen Armstrong
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You are your best self when you give yourself away.
Karen Armstrong
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Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself it is not MY pain.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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Let's use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people's stories and histories.
Karen Armstrong
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In order to always treat others, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we have to learn about each other. Not just relying on an op-ed piece we may have read here, or a half-remembered interview on the television program there that happens to chime with our own views.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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Geniuses are not always pleasant people.
Karen Armstrong
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I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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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
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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
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I was a lousy nun. I couldn't do it. I couldn't find God. It wasn't suitable for me. It is suitable for very few people.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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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
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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
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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