Quote

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

Karen Armstrong

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Karen Armstrong
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: November 14
Author
Historian Of Religion
Islamicist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
Darkness
Death
Form
Without
Ascent
Life
Prior
Descent
Heights
Height

More quotes by Karen Armstrong

Image
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.
Karen Armstrong
Image
I like silence I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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
Image
There must be no coercion in matters of faith!
Karen Armstrong
Image
The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is really there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity.
Karen Armstrong
Image
The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.
Karen Armstrong
Image
At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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
Image
It is people who are violent, rather than religions and since we secularised our politics we have had two major world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - none of which were inspired by religion. If we want to understand the dangers of our world, we can no longer accept the old received idea
Karen Armstrong
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Karen Armstrong