300 Quotes by Karen Armstrong

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

The trouble with a lot of modern theology and a lot of modern thinking about God, is that we think of God a sort of being like ourselves, but bigger and better with likes and dislikes similar to our own.

The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The.

Religions don’t own compassion; it is a human virtue.

Compassion is not an option. It’s the key to our survival.

One day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with betrayal and cruelty. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problems of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over, it was time for the evening prayer.

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It’s not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.

Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace.

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.