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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
Quartets
Beethoven
String
Strings
Express
Pain

More quotes by 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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Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.
Karen Armstrong
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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
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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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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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We can't say what God is, and until the modern period, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians in the three God religions all knew that. They insisted that we have no idea what we meant when we said that God was good, or wise, or intelligent.
Karen Armstrong
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There must be no coercion in matters of faith!
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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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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I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing.
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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It's a great event to get outside and enjoy nature. I find it very exciting no matter how many times I see bald eagles.
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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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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From the Rabbis of the early Talmudic age I learned that there is never a last word on God. There's, you always continue to question. Even God himself could be questioned and you can keep arguing with one another and there will be no end to this conversation about the divine because no human expression of God can be ultimate.
Karen Armstrong
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A gentleman is not born but crafted. He had to work on himself in the same way as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.
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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In order to always treat others, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we have to learn about each other. Not just relying on an op-ed piece we may have read here, or a half-remembered interview on the television program there that happens to chime with our own views.
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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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