Karen Armstrong Quotes

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.1

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.

There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role models and give us precise moral teaching, but this was not the intention of the biblical authors. The Eden sto...

There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour.

Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair.

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importa...

When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.

Where Ibn al-Arabi had written for the intellectual, Rumi was summoning all human beings to live beyond themselves, and to transcend the routines of daily life. The Mathnawi celebrated the Sufi lifest...

With this new empathetic understanding of the context, we will find that we can imagine ourselves, in similar circumstances, feeling the same.

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus

Cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

If we harm our neighbors, we also inflict damage on ourselves. There

A myth could not tell a hunter how to kill his prey or how to organise an expedition efficiently, but it helped him to deal with his complicated emotions about the killing of animals. Logos was effici...

According to Luke, far from denouncing the cult, like Stephen, they worshipped together every day in the temple.22 Indeed, the revered Pharisee Gamaliel, whose views were more liberal than Paul’s, is...

After Iyman Faris’s foiled plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, however, most of the al-Qaeda central command had either been killed or captured, and there were no more major incidents.85 But just as...

Again, what works well in the spiritual domain can become destructive and even immoral if interpreted literally and practically in the mundane world. It

And before you embark on an argument or a debate, ask yourself honestly if you are ready to change your mind.

At the end of my first attempt to write a biography of Muhammad, I quoted the prescient words of the Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Writing in the mid-twentieth century shortly before the Su...

But Christina never forgot that when I was a child, I needed only one person to understand my suffering and pain.… One is very important.5

Compassion has dropped so far out of sight these days that many are confused about what is required. It even inspires overt hostility.