{"author":"Karen Armstrong","author_id":"Karen+Armstrong","total_quotes":49,"quotes":[{"text":"Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside.","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["books","mythology","reading"],"id":1714,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"},{"text":"Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["society","islam","gut "],"id":8815,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"},{"text":"Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["technology","light","today "],"id":30215,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"},{"text":"If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95).","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["amorality","compassion","empathy","immorality","morality","reason"],"id":34291,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"},{"text":"Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate.","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["good","great","doing good "],"id":35437,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"},{"text":"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 realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource.' This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["ecology","myths","revolution","spirituality"],"id":46068,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"},{"text":"Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["identity","people","ego "],"id":48801,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"},{"text":"When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and mystery at the heart of existence. They have felt that it is deeply connected with themselves and with the natural world, but that it also goes beyond. However we choose to define it - it has been called God, Brahman, or Nirvana - this transcendence has been a fact of human life. We have all experienced something similar, whatever our theological opinions, when we listen to a great piece of music or hear a beautiful poem and feel touched within and lifted, momentarily, beyond ourselves. We tend to seek out this experience, and if we do not find it in one setting - in a church or synagogue, for example - we would look elsewhere.","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["existence","god","mystery","transcendence"],"id":54424,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"},{"text":"We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber's targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims. But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the 20th century, the rate of civilian deaths rose sharply and now stands at 90 percent. In the West we solemnize the deaths of our regular troops carefully and recurrently honor the memory of the soldier who dies do his country. Yet the civilian deaths we cause are rarely mentioned, and there has been no sustained outcry in the West against them. Suicide bombing shocks us to the core; but should it be more shocking than the deaths of thousands of children in their homelands every every year because of land mines? Or collateral damage in a drone strike?","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["religion","suicide-bombers","violence"],"id":56334,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"},{"text":"When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is 'really' there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again.'from Coleridge: Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.","author":"Karen Armstrong","tags":["fear","inspiration"],"id":68126,"author_id":"Karen+Armstrong"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":49,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}