Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.
Karen ArmstrongThere are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.
Karen ArmstrongI never intended to be a historian of religion. My aim was to become a professor of English Literature in a university, but I had a series of absolute career disasters and found myself making television programs about the nature of religion and about Christian history and started to discover about other religious traditions, and that was an absolute eye-opener for me.
Karen ArmstrongCompassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.
Karen ArmstrongAnd sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.
Karen Armstrong