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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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Karen Armstrong
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: November 14
Author
Historian Of Religion
Islamicist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
Find
People
Nun
Lousy
Suitable
Couldn
Wasn

More quotes by Karen Armstrong

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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.
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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.
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In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do.
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Huge imbalance in power has resulted in the alienation, rage, fury, and awful amoral terrorism that has erupted and is erupting at the present time. And in order to counter this, we need to make the compassionate voice of religion and morality a dynamic force in our world.
Karen Armstrong
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Geniuses are not always pleasant people.
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We can't say what God is, and until the modern period, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians in the three God religions all knew that. They insisted that we have no idea what we meant when we said that God was good, or wise, or intelligent.
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.
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Intelligence doesn't just mean tracking down terrorists It means finding out what is in people's hearts and minds and discovering the complexity of most issues.
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So, we think about God far to easily and that's because of a lot of social, intellectual, and scientific changes that have taken place in the western world and that has made God very problematic for a lot of people.
Karen Armstrong
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Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.
Karen Armstrong
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A gentleman is not born but crafted. He had to work on himself in the same way as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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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.
Karen Armstrong
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It's a great event to get outside and enjoy nature. I find it very exciting no matter how many times I see bald eagles.
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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Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse.
Karen Armstrong
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If we try to hold on to our partial glimpses of the divine, we cut it down to our own size and close our minds. Like it or nor, our human experience of anything or anybody is always incomplete: there is usually something that eludes us, some portion of experience that evades our grasp.
Karen Armstrong
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Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears.
Karen Armstrong
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If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.
Karen Armstrong
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The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.
Karen Armstrong