A Quote by Karen Armstrong

Often when religious leaders come together, they talk about a particular sexual ethic, or an abstruse doctrine, as though this, rather than compassion, was the test of spiritual life.

Karen Armstrong

Quote Topics

About Come Compassion Doctrine Ethic Leaders Life Often Particular Rather Religious Religious Leaders Sexual Spiritual Spiritual Life Talk Test Than Though Together

Quote Author

Karen Armstrong
English - Writer
Born: November 14, 1944

Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.

Karen Armstrong

It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

Alain de Botton

We brought the religious leaders and the secular development workers together in one room. We asked the religious leaders what are your reservations about development workers? And we asked the development workers, what are your reservations about religious leaders? It turns out that most of the problems are not really problems at all, but rather misunderstandings, misconceptions, and mis-communications.

Abul Kalam Azad

Religious and spiritual leaders should be held accountable for environmental activism, not only because they have access to large communities and can influence votes but because service is integral to religious and spiritual life.

Radhanath Swami

Religious and spiritual leaders should be held accountable for environmental activism, not only because they have access to large communities and can influence votes, but because service is integral to religious and spiritual life.

Radhanath Swami

We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind. To do so effectively, the world needs a global ethic with values which give meaning to life experiences and, more than religious institutions and dogmas, sustain the non-material dimension of humanity. Mankind's universal values of love, compassion, solidarity, caring and tolerance should form the basis for this global ethic which should permeate culture, politics, trade, religion and philosophy. It should also permeate the extended family of the United Nations.

Wangari Maathai

When there is pressure for leaders to respond to problems or crises, they often simply intensify their efforts in their particular defined sphere of activity - even if that's not relevant to the real problem. To do otherwise requires taking on entrenched practices and asserting power in areas where it often will not be well received. And leaders tend to see major crises more as threats to their own position rather than as systemic challenges for the societies that they govern or the institutions that they manage.

Arthur Demarest

Time to time I get together with the rabbis, with religious leaders, leaders of congregations, and I talk to them, and wherever a need arises, we do everything we can to meet those needs.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

A comprehensive doctrine, either religious or secular, aspires to cover all of life. I mean, if it's a religious doctrine, it talks about our relation to God and the universe; it has an ordering of all the virtues, not only political virtues but moral virtues as well, including the virtues of private life, and the rest. Now we may feel philosophically that it doesn't really cover everything, but it aims to cover everything, and a secular doctrine does also.

John Rawls

It's true that to speak of an ethic of giftedness, which is very much the ethic that I deploy in raising questions about designer children and genetic engineering - an appreciation of the giftedness of the child or the giftedness of life does have religious resonance, because a great many religious traditions emphasize the sense in which the good things in life are not all our own doing; they are gifts from God.

Michael Sandel

Scientists and religious leaders, activists and first nation leaders, CEOs of corporations and actors, all of us need to come together right now, because the planet is in a lot of pain.

Ellen Page

Work is spiritual. It is a place where we have the opportunity for spiritual growth. Often, these opportunities come from the 'how' of the ways we do our work rather than the 'what' of the work itself.

Anne Wilson Schaef

It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.

Cheryl Strayed

I got to a point where kind of a oneness with everything and a great compassion. It teaches you compassion. It was a great, enlightening experience, a spiritual experience. Not particularly religious, but spiritual. It was great. I can still go there.

Larry Hagman

I was convinced that worship at its best is a social experience with people of all levels of life coming together to realize their oneness and unity under God. Whenever the church, consciously or unconsciously, caters to one class it loses the spiritual force of the "whosoever will, let him come, doctrine and is in danger of becoming a little more than a social club with a thin veneer of religiosity."