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[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

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
Compassion
Family
Learn
School
Live
People

More quotes by 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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When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.
Karen Armstrong
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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.
Karen Armstrong
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You are your best self when you give yourself away.
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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Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.
Karen Armstrong
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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.
Karen Armstrong
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From the Rabbis of the early Talmudic age I learned that there is never a last word on God. There's, you always continue to question. Even God himself could be questioned and you can keep arguing with one another and there will be no end to this conversation about the divine because no human expression of God can be ultimate.
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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There must be no coercion in matters of faith!
Karen Armstrong
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After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful.
Karen Armstrong
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I think I get from my books what other people get from family or a relationship or from prayer.
Karen Armstrong
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My greatest solace is my study. If I am deprived of my study, I can become lost, unhappy and unhinged.
Karen Armstrong
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Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories.
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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We talk about God as though he was like a somebody. We ask him to bless our nation, or save our Queen, or give us a fine day for the picnic. And we actually expect him to be on our side in an election or war even though our opponents are also God's children.
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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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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there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.
Karen Armstrong
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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.
Karen Armstrong