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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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Karen Armstrong
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: November 14
Author
Historian Of Religion
Islamicist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
Study
Religion
Art
Form
Many
Search
Way
Regard
Meaning
Ways

More quotes by Karen Armstrong

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The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.
Karen Armstrong
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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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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
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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
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Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself it is not MY pain.
Karen Armstrong
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If professional religious leaders can [no longer] instruct..., our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.
Karen Armstrong
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My greatest solace is my study. If I am deprived of my study, I can become lost, unhappy and unhinged.
Karen Armstrong
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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.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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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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Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.
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.
Karen Armstrong
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Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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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
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Religions don't own compassion it is a human virtue.
Karen Armstrong
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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.
Karen Armstrong
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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.
Karen Armstrong
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A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.
Karen Armstrong
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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