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Book: The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
Quotes of Book: The Spiral Staircase: My Climb
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  1. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increasingly I found that quite liberating.
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  2. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    Compassion does not, of course, mean to feel pity or condescend, but to feel with
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  3. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body - particularly the bodies of women.
    book-quotehuman-body

  4. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.
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  5. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    Every single one of the major traditions-Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms-teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others.
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  6. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    Even though the discples were not aware of it, the presence was with them while they were reviewing the scriptures together on the road. Henceforth, we will catch only a fleeting glimpse of it -- in the study of sacred writings, in other human beings, in liturgy, and in communion with strangers. But these moments remain us that our fellow men and women are themselves sacred; there is something about them taht is worthy of absolute reverence, is in the last resort mysterious, and we will always elude us.
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  7. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is "really" there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again."from Coleridge: Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread
    book-quoteinspiration

  8. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.
    book-quotereligion

  9. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egoism I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you.
    book-quotespirituality

  10. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.
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  11. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.
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  12. Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb

    Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.
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