Karen Armstrong Quotes

Religion does not mean just precepts, a temple, monastery, or other external signs, for these as well as hearing and thinking are subsidiary factors in taming the mind.

I used to always go to church on holidays, but I don't go much any more.

To me, religion is an agreement between a group of people about what God is. Spirituality is a one-on-one relationship.

It is easy to talk on religion, but difficult to practice it.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.

But I don't necessarily define my faith by going to church every Sunday.

So often, religion is identified in terms coined by Christianity as sets of belief. But I had the sense that it not only involves practice, but also emotion and levels of our experience that are almost precognitive.

Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.

A vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in Flowers or music.

To say a prayer doesn't take more than a minute, but you need the discipline to do it.

One should hallow all that one does in one's natural life. One eats in holiness, tastes the taste of food in holiness, and the table becomes an altar. One works in holiness, and raises up the sparks which hide themselves in all tools. One walks in holiness across the fields, and the soft songs of all herbs, which they voice to God, enter into the song of our soul.

Sannyas is only a declaration. The work is meditation. In one single word, my religion is complete, and that is meditation.

Religion becomes a state of mind achievable in almost any activity of life, if this activity is raised to a suitable level of perfection.

The Bhagavad-Gita calls on humanity to dedicate body, mind and soul to pure duty and not to become mental voluptuaries at the mercy of random desires and undisciplined impulses.

I’ve got to push everything out of mind save the name of Jesus. I say His name over and over again, for as long as fifteen minutes, until I find my soul suspended in what the ancient Celtic Christians called a “thin place”–a state where the boundary between heaven and earth, divine and human, dissolves. You could say that I use the name of Jesus as my koan.

Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.

Prayer is the very highest energy of which the mind is capable.

Fasting and prayer are common injunctions in my religion.

Meditation is the royal road to the attainment of freedom, a mysterious ladder that reaches from earth to heaven, darkness to light, mortality to Immortality.

Hold on to your salah, because if you lose that, you will lose everything else.

Religion idolizes concepts and avoids personal experience.

When I wake up, I immediately pray. When I go to sleep, I pray. Honestly, a prayer every second, in every breath. I suggest the whole world to do it. Prayer is amazing.

I think poetry has started to take on a supplementary role of prayer for some people. The churches, I think, including my own, are terrible at teaching people how to pray. It may be that we need to learn from the ground up as religious people, whether Christian or not, how to pray.

My fast is a matter between God and myself.

To be here and now, you have to be in meditation, beyond mind.