Karen Armstrong Quotes

The self as the essence of individuality is unitemporal and unique; as an archetypal symbol it is a God-image and therefore universal and eternal.

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

The simple tableau is so rich with meaning that whether represented on the mantelpiece or in the mind, it seems suspended, complete unto itself, somewhere in eternity.

But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny.

Myth is supposed to bring us together, but fantasy alienates us.

The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.

I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man's existence.

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.

The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

Important thing about myth is that it's not just something that you believe, a myth is essentially a program for action. And unless you translate a mythical story, or a doctrine out of the church, into practical action, it just remains incomprehensible. Rather like the rules of a board game which seem very sort of dull and complicated and incomprehensible until you pick up the dice and start to play, when everything falls into place.

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.

What is beautiful is a joy for all seasons.

I am continually trying to find meaning in the world. If we cannot find some ultimate significance or value in our lives, we fall very easily into despair.

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that informs the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a

If life is so meaningless, then why are we always bringing it up?

From Pandora's Box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself.

Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing... Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits.