300 Quotes by Karen Armstrong

People still dreamed of going on Crusade and liberating Jerusalem, but in an important development, holy warfare was beginning to merge with the patriotism of national war.

We have a duty to get to know one another, and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village.

The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.

There is a linguistic connection between the three words “myth,” “mysticism” and “mystery.” All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence.

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.

We are meaning-seeking creatures.

Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder.

The Rhineland cities were developing the market economy that would eventually replace agrarian civilization; they were therefore in the very early stages of modernization, a transition that always strains social relations.

Mythology was not about theology, in the modern sense, but about human experience. People thought that gods, humans, animals and nature were inextricably bound up together, subject to the same laws, and composed of the same divine substance. There.