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When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.
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
Dethrone
Centre
Compassion
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Feels
World
More quotes by Karen Armstrong
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
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
there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.
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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.
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Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself it is not MY pain.
Karen Armstrong
But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.
Karen Armstrong
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
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
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
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
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
We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.
Karen Armstrong
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
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
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
My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.
Karen Armstrong
And so, one of the reasons why I started my Charter for Compassion, was to bring the Golden Rule back to the center of religion and morality and not put other's secondary goals, less demand goals, into the forefront.
Karen Armstrong
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
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
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.
Karen Armstrong
