Quote

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

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
Thinking
Felt
Worn
Left
Awful
Someone
Train
Wanted
Saws
Book
Religious
Nothing
Reading
Years
Whatever
Convent
Think
Religion
Disgusted

More quotes by Karen Armstrong

Image
I like silence I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
Karen Armstrong
Image
Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves.
Karen Armstrong
Image
We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.
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
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
Image
You have to get into the water and learn against what seems to be the law gravity to float and dancing, or athletics takes you years before you develop a skill. But if you work at it, practicing daily, you can enable your body to do things that are utterly impossible to an untrained physic.
Karen Armstrong
Image
Compassion has to become a discipline. It's something that you do. It's no good thinking that you agree with compassion or not, you've just got to do it. Just like it's no good agreeing that it's possible to float, you just have to get into the pool and then you learn that it's possible.
Karen Armstrong
Image
Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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
Image
Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.
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
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
I used to hate religion, I loathed it in my angry days.
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
[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)
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
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
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
Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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