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Karen Armstrong

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Famous Karen Armstrong Quotes

“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.”

HumansStoriesValuesFallHuman BeingsOur LivesDespairEvidencePatternsContrarySettingSettingsDepressingChaotic
Book:A Short History Of Myth
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“Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal.”

PeopleMenMindHumansMadeMatterFallCultureLevelsExistenceAttentionOur LivesAtheismDespairEternalMen And WomenConcernedUniversalFoundationConstantPositive AtheismMythPracticalsMortalsPrimariesSignificanceHuman MindTimelessDay To DayDay LifeOrigin Of LifeDay To Day Life
Book:The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism
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“I left the convent and that was because I wasn't a very good nun. I could see that I wasn't going to make it. It's very difficult to be a nun, or to live a religious life. It's very difficult to live a life of total celibacy or a life without any possessions or material responsibilities at all, or in total obedience to somebody else, and remain a mature whole human being, and I knew that I wasn't going to be one of those.”

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Author:Karen Armstrong
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“Religions have found that if you behave in a certain way, if you sort of perform certain rituals that expand your mind and make you realize that will make you realize and help you to seguey into transcendence and perform certain acts, adopt a certain lifestyle, you develop new capacities of mind and heart, just like the dancer, or the athlete that make you into a whole human being and principle after one of these disciplines right across the board in all of the faiths is compassion, the ability to feel with the other person.”

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Author:Karen Armstrong
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“People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And that was essential that the discourse of science or logic related directed to the external world. The other was mythos, what the Greeks called myth, which didn't mean a fantasy story, but it was a narrative associated with ritual and ethical practice but it helped us to address problems for which there were no easy answers, like mortality, cruelty, the sorrow that overtakes us all that's part of the human condition. And these two were not in opposition, we needed both.”

PeopleWorldWayHumansMeanTwoReasonStoriesProblemEasyAnswersPracticeFantasyConditionsNeededSorrowEssentialsLogicMythCrueltyNarrativeGreekRelatedAddressesOppositionMortalityEthicalRitualHuman ConditionDiscourseTwo WaysLogosEasy AnswersFantasy Stories
Author: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.”

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Book:The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
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“A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.”

IfsWorldHumansDifferentSelfUniverseCausesCreativityKnowingAtheismEffectsEgoMachinesMereAtheistAbsurdRelateRejectsControlledTyrantsDictatorAgnosticJustifiedOmnipotentHuman FreedomThere Being No GodCogsTinkering
Author:Karen Armstrong
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“Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.”

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Book:The Spiral Staircase
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“Even though the discples were not aware of it, the presence was with them while they were reviewing the scriptures together on the road. Henceforth, we will catch only a fleeting glimpse of it -- in the study of sacred writings, in other human beings, in liturgy, and in communion with strangers. But these moments remain us that our fellow men and women are themselves sacred; there is something about them taht is worthy of absolute reverence, is in the last resort mysterious, and we will always elude us.”

MenWritingHumansMomentsTogetherLastsHuman BeingsStudyMen And WomenAbsolutesFellowsSacredStrangerWorthyScriptureMysteriousReverenceCommunionGlimpseFleetingResortsFellow ManEludeLiturgyElude Us
Author: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. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.”

IfsWayLifeHumansRealityTruthLawCertainReligionChangeAcceptingMoralPracticeImpossibleHuman NatureAcceptanceEthicsDiscoveryFunctionTwentiesTransformationHistoricalMythDoctrineBehaveBreakfastEthicalAestheticTransformedConformPropositionsMetaphysicalAestheticsAlchemyFamous WomenSelf TransformationSpiritual TransformationEnhancement
Author:Karen Armstrong
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“Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us: like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God-not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has it's own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.”

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Author:Karen Armstrong
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“Alexander's achievement was not the conquest of India, but the feat of actually getting there and his two years in India were more of a geographical expedition than a military campaign. .... a Greek army had reached what they regarded as the end of the earth. They had pitted themselves against the ultimate as bravely as the yogins had struggled to break through the limits of the human psyche. Where mystics had conquered interior space, Alexander explored the farthest reaches of the physical world. .... like many of the axial sages, he was constantly 'straining after more'.”

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Author:Karen Armstrong
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