Karen Armstrong Quotes

Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand.

I believe in God. When everything collapses, we grip the last hold, we look from the secure haven how the godless society of the old, holy Europe falls apart. May the game begin.

If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.

Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.

The sum of a million facts is not the truth.

Example is always more efficacious than precept.

There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.

I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

The meaning lies in the appropriation.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

Do more than believe: practice.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

I do not understand this analogy," Mencheres muttered.

Example is better than precept.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!

As Confucius once said, 'He who does nothing is the one who does nothing.'" Gabby pondered the words, the furrowed her brow. "did Confucius really say that?" Sunglasses in place, Stephanie managed the tiniest of shrugs. "No, but who cared? The point is, they handled, and most likely they found some sort of self-satisfaction in their industrious-ness. Who am I to deprive them of that?

Being that can be understood is language.

Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

A lot of the times you read something and you don't realize that you are going to have to do the things that you read.