Quote

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

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
Christian
Cry
Mystic
Left
Neither
Temple
Home
Behinds
Ecstasy
Glimpsed
Made
Behind
Temples
Mosque
Men
Divine
Muslim
Synagogue
Quite
Equally
Sufi
Church
Jew
Mosques
Common
Distinction
Distinctions

More quotes by 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
Religion is a practical discipline and it's one that we have always done, ever since humanity appeared on the scene when Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens. Sapiens became a human being, our minds very naturally segue into transcendence.
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 are your best self when you give yourself away.
Karen Armstrong
Image
I think I get from my books what other people get from family or a relationship or from prayer.
Karen Armstrong
Image
Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.
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
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
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 is a danger in monotheism, and it's called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine.
Karen Armstrong
Image
When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.
Karen Armstrong
Image
I like silence I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
Karen Armstrong
Image
Sometimes I call myself a freelance, I can't see any one of the great religions as superior to others.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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
Image
Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.
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
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
I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing.
Karen Armstrong
Image
There must be no coercion in matters of faith!
Karen Armstrong
Image
I used to hate religion, I loathed it in my angry days.
Karen Armstrong