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Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself it is not MY pain.

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
Pain
Quartets
Beethoven
String
Strings
Express

More quotes by Karen Armstrong

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Each of the world religions has its own particular genius, its own special insight into the nature and requirements of compassion, and has something unique to teach us.
Karen Armstrong
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Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them.
Karen Armstrong
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When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.
Karen Armstrong
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...there is something wrong with any spirituality that does not inspire selfless concern for others
Karen Armstrong
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Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem.
Karen Armstrong
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Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.
Karen Armstrong
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Often when religious leaders come together, they talk about a particular sexual ethic, or an abstruse doctrine, as though this, rather than compassion, was the test of spiritual life.
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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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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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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Geniuses are not always pleasant people.
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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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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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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For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.
Karen Armstrong
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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)
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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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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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
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It is people who are violent, rather than religions and since we secularised our politics we have had two major world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - none of which were inspired by religion. If we want to understand the dangers of our world, we can no longer accept the old received idea
Karen Armstrong