Karen Armstrong Quotes

The noblest men of all ages, Christian saints of the most transcendent spirituality have attained their wonderful development through the spiritual rays of this planet because of the intense feeling of Oneness with the divine and with all that lives and breathes in the universe.

All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.

I've been on a quest for spiritual answers for a long time. The things I've learned about interconnectedness and non-duality and the feeling of tapping into your soul that goes beyond the edge of your skin is important to me. Once I learned that, I'm far less often trapped in my own little man problems. Me against the universe problems.

The pure mind is itself Brahman; it therefore follows that Brahman is not other than the mind of the sage.

For me, the massiveness of what I don't know is one way I experience God. It creates in me a feeling of humility and a sense of gratitude.

Any path to knowledge is a path to God-or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

Strange, I feel as if up to now I had written no more than a few notes.

The Divine is simply that which science has not yet explained. In effect, God = Infinity - Human Knowledge.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be finished. No matter how much I write, there will always be something I should’ve said.

The five senses are the ministers of the soul.

What was once easy became confused and hard, which brings us back to the mystic question, who is God?

Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightest word in any language is its word for God.

Underneath the world of sense perceptions and the world of mind activity, there is the vastness of being. There's a vast spaciousness. There's a vast stillness and there's a little ripple activity on the surface, which isn't separate, just like the ripples are not separate from the ocean.

You have to see the miracles for there to be miracles.

In the end, we know God as unknown.

Faith is the act of seeing beyond the religion of possibility of the senses, the mind and the intelligence.

Drop the mind and the divine. God is not an object, it is a merger. The mind resists a merger, the mind is against surrender; the mind is very cunning and calculating.

The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all

Only in prayer can we learn to love God with all our heart, mind and soul.

Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called to fill in the gaps that science did not understand.

It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition...Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain.

It is within this fathoms-long carcass, with its mind and its notions, that I declare there is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world and the path leading to the cessation of the world.

If you look at the life of Jesus, that's an example of true worship. You know look at the stories, if you want to learn about real worship read Matthew through John. Seriously. You just read it and you will see the true level. You see when Jesus is in the boat and the storm comes when it comes and the winds are blowing and Jesus is sleeping in the boat and the disciples are freaking out. And Jesus wakes up and says "What you guys got is a problem, no?" and he commands the seas to be calm that's true worship.

It seems to me that one of the most basic human experiences, one that is genuinely universal and unites-or, more precisely, could unite-all of humanity, is the experience of transcendence in the broadest sense of the word.