300 Quotes by Karen Armstrong

If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.

Aristotle's account of the Katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.

I did not want to appear before the world as pathetic, deprssed, and psychologically ill. So I erected a barrier of words and wit around myself, so that nobody could see how needy I really was.

Humiliate your enemy is dangerous.

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment.

Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion.

Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body - particularly the bodies of women.

Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being--whoever he or she may be--is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery.

As soon as I stopped trying to exploit my literary skills to advance my career or enhance my reputation, I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself to the beauty of the words and in the wisdom of the writer. It was a kind of ekstasis, an ecstasy that was not an exotic, tranced state of consciousness but, in the literal sense of the word, a going beyond self.