Quote

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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Karen Armstrong
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: November 14
Author
Historian Of Religion
Islamicist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
Dangerous
Involves
Nice
Fears
Religion
Complexes
Desire
Desires
Thing
Complex
Heady
Emotions
Yearnings
Atheism
Potentially
Emotion
Yearning

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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)
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Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.
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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
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Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself it is not MY pain.
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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.
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It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.
Karen Armstrong
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My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.
Karen Armstrong
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The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.
Karen Armstrong
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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.
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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
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There must be no coercion in matters of faith!
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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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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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
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Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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I used to hate religion, I loathed it in my angry days.
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.
Karen Armstrong