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I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.

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
Pain
Suffers
Remind
Unique
Everybody
Suffering

More quotes by Karen Armstrong

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I like silence I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
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
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Huge imbalance in power has resulted in the alienation, rage, fury, and awful amoral terrorism that has erupted and is erupting at the present time. And in order to counter this, we need to make the compassionate voice of religion and morality a dynamic force in our world.
Karen Armstrong
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You know how it is in the symphony when you are listening to the symphony, the last notes die away, and there's often a beat of silence in the auditorium before the applause begins. It's a very full and pregnant silence. Now theology should bring us to live into that silence, into that pregnant pause.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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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
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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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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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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
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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
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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
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Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.
Karen Armstrong
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We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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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
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Sometimes I call myself a freelance, I can't see any one of the great religions as superior to others.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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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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Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself it is not MY pain.
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