Annie Besant Quotes

Meditation means this opening out of the soul to the Divine and letting the Divine shine in without obstruction from the personal self. Therefore it means renunciation. It means throwing away everything that one has, and waiting empty for the light to come in. ~ Annie Besant

Religions are branches from a common trunk - Divine Wisdom. ~ Annie Besant

Control of the tongue! Vital for the man who would try to tread the Path, for no harsh or unkind word, no hasty impatient phrase, may escape from the tongue which is consecrated to service, and which must not injure even an enemy; for that which wounds has no place in the Kingdom of Love. ~ Annie Besant

Those who can serve best, those who help most, those who sacrifice most, those are the people who will be loved in life and honoured in death, when all questions of colour are swept away and when in a free country free citizens shall meet on equal grounds. ~ Annie Besant

Islam believes in many prophets, and Al Quran is nothing but a confirmation of the old Scriptures. ~ Annie Besant

You should always take a religion at its best and not at its worst, from its highest teachings and not from the lowest practices of some of its adherents. ~ Annie Besant

Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class. ~ Annie Besant

Celibacy is not natural to men or to women; all bodily needs require their legitimate satisfaction, and celibacy is a disregard of natural law. ~ Annie Besant

Clairvoyants can see flashes of colour, constantly changing, in the aura that surrounds every person: each thought, each feeling, thus translating itself in the astral world, visible to the astral sight. ~ Annie Besant

In the light of reincarnation life changes its aspect, for it becomes the school of the eternal Man within us, who seeks therein his development, the Man that was and is and shall be, for whom the hour will never strike. ~ Annie Besant

Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining. ~ Annie Besant

My own life in India, since I came to it in 1893 to make it my home, has been devoted to one purpose, to give back to India her ancient freedom. ~ Annie Besant

Among the various vernaculars that are spoken in different parts of India, there is one that stands out strongly from the rest, as that which is most widely known. It is Hindi. A man who knows Hindi can travel over India and find everywhere Hindi-speaking people. ~ Annie Besant

Britons are good, though often brutal, colonists where they come into relations with entirely uncivilized tribes whose past is so remote as to be forgotten. But they trample with their heavy boots over the sensitive, delicate susceptibilities of an ancient, highly civilized and cultured nation, such as India. ~ Annie Besant

Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd. ~ Annie Besant

The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity. ~ Annie Besant

Matter is, in its constituent elements, the same as spirit; existence is one, however manifold in its phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. ~ Annie Besant

Representative institutions are as much a part of the true Briton as his language and his literature. ~ Annie Besant

I often think that woman is more free in Islam than in Christianity. Woman is more protected by Islam than by the faith which preaches monogamy. In AI Quran the law about woman is juster and more liberal. ~ Annie Besant

There is far more misunderstanding of Islam than there is, I think, of the other religions of the world. So many things are said of it by those who do not belong to that faith. ~ Annie Besant

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows. ~ Annie Besant

Socialism is the ideal state, but it can never be achieved while man is so selfish. ~ Annie Besant

Premonitions, presentiments, the sensing of unseen presences and many allied experiences are due to the activity of the astral body and its reaction on the physical; their ever-increasing frequency is merely the result of its evolution among educated people. ~ Annie Besant

'Easter' is a movable event, calculated by the relative positions of sun and moon, an impossible way of fixing year by year the anniversary of a historical event, but a very natural and indeed inevitable way of calculating a solar festival. These changing dates do not point to the history of a man, but to the hero of a solar myth. ~ Annie Besant

A people can prosper under a very bad government and suffer under a very good one, if in the first case the local administration is effective and in the second it is inefficient. ~ Annie Besant

Purification is but the cleaning of the lamp-glass which hides the Light ~ Annie Besant

Everyone knows the beautiful story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac. How this noble father led his child to the slaughter; how Isaac meekly submitted; how the farce went on till the lad was bound and laid on the altar, and how God then stopped the murder, and blessed the intending murderer for his willingness to commit the crime. ~ Annie Besant

The sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of it into the twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period of our incarceration; at death we step out of the prison again into the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality. ~ Annie Besant

No soul that aspires can ever fail to rise; no heart that loves can ever be abandoned. Difficulties exist only that in overcoming them we may grow strong, and they who have suffered are able to save. ~ Annie Besant

This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker. ~ Annie Besant

The worlds in which man is evolving as he treads the circle of births and deaths are three: the physical world, the astral or intermediate world, the mental or heavenly world. ~ Annie Besant

I was a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me, and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity. ~ Annie Besant

Empty-brained triflers who have never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions, speak of atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. ~ Annie Besant

There is a charm in making a stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will survive the competition in the mixture. ~ Annie Besant

Theosophy has no code of morals, being itself the embodiment of the highest morality; it presents to its students the highest moral teachings of all religions, gathering the most fragrant blossoms from the gardens of the world-faiths. ~ Annie Besant

Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge. ~ Annie Besant

Man is a spiritual intelligence, who has taken flesh with the object of gaining experience in worlds below the spiritual, in order that he may be able to master and to rule them, and in later ages take his place in the creative and directing hierarchies of the universe. ~ Annie Besant

Evil is only imperfection, that which is not complete, which is becoming, but has not yet found its end. ~ Annie Besant

God is immanent in every atom, all-pervading, all-sustaining,all-evolving; He is its source and its end, its cause and its object, its centre and circumference; it is built on Him as its sure foundation, it breathes in Him as its encircling space; He is in everything and everything in Him. ~ Annie Besant

It is the duty of the followers of Islam to spread through the civilised world, a knowledge of what Islam means - its spirit and message. ~ Annie Besant

The destruction of India's village system was the greatest of England's blunders. ~ Annie Besant

If we believe in a God at all, we must surely ascribe to him perfection of wisdom and perfection of goodness; we are then forced to conceive of Him - however strange it may sound to those who believe, not only without seeing but also without thinking - as without will, because He must always necessarily pursue the course which is wisest and best. ~ Annie Besant

In a 50 mile radius around Chicago one can see the red aura of pain, agony, terror, anger from all the animals being butchered there. ~ Annie Besant

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings. ~ Annie Besant

Beauty is no dead thing. It is the manifestation of God in nature. There is not one object in nature untouched by man that is not beautiful, for God's manifestation is beauty. It shines through all His works, and not only in those that may give pleasure to man. ~ Annie Besant

When we recognise that unity of all living things, then at once arises the question - how can we support this life of ours with least injury to the lives around us; how can we prevent our own life adding to the suffering of the world in which we live? ~ Annie Besant

Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another. ~ Annie Besant

Not out of right practice comes right thinking, but out of right thinking comes right practice. It matters enormously what you think. If you think falsely, you will act mistakenly; if you think basely, your conduct will suit your thinking. ~ Annie Besant

In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hourglass - all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors. ~ Annie Besant

India is a country in which every great religion finds a home. ~ Annie Besant

God' is always the equivalent of 'I do not know. ~ Annie Besant

Where love rules, laws are not needed. ~ Annie Besant

Belief in karma ought to make the life pure, strong, serene, and glad. Only our own deeds can hinder us; only our own will can fetter us. Once let men recognize this truth, and the hour of their liberation has struck. Nature cannot enslave the soul that by wisdom has gained power and uses both in love. ~ Annie Besant

We were an ill-matched pair, my husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the 'master-in-my-own-house theory,' thinking much of the details of home arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty appeased. ~ Annie Besant

Isaiah is by far the finest and least objectionable of the seventeen prophets whose supposed productions form the latter part of the Old Testament. A distinctly higher moral tone appears in the writings called by his name, and this is especially noticeable in the 'Second Isaiah,' who wrote after the Babylonish captivity. ~ Annie Besant

Let Indian history be set side by side with Europe history with what there is of the latter century by century and let us see whether India need blush at the comparison. ~ Annie Besant

The essence of religion is the knowledge of God which is eternal life. That and nothing less than that is religion. Everything else is on the surface, is superfluous save for the needs of men. ~ Annie Besant

What is a philosophy? It Is an answer satisfactory to the reason to all the great problems of life. That is what is meant by philosophy. It must satisfy the reason, and it must show the unity underlying the endless diversity of the facts that science observes. ~ Annie Besant

The Soul which is approaching its' liberation, as it looks back over past lives ... down the vistas of the centuries along which it has slowly been climbing, ... is able to see there the way in which the bonds were made, the causes which set it in motion. It is able to see how many of those causes have worked themselves out and ... how many ... are still working themselves out. ~ Annie Besant

What is the essence of theosophy? It is the fact that man, being himself divine, can know the divinity whose life he shares. As an inevitable corollary to this supreme truth comes the fact of the brotherhood of man. ~ Annie Besant

The idea of reverence for God is transmitted from parent to child, it is educated into an abnormal development, and thus almost indefinitely strengthened, but yet it does appear to me that the bent to worship is an integral part of man's nature. ~ Annie Besant

Once a person has taken their life, in the inner realms, the suicide will repeat automatically the feelings of despair and fear which preceded his self murder, and go through the act and the death struggle time after time with ghastly persistence ... They remain conscious - often entangled in the final scene of the earth life for a very long time, unaware that they have lost the physical body. ~ Annie Besant

Theosophy tries to bridge the gulf between Buddhism and Christianity by pointing to the fundamental spiritual truths on which both religions are built, and by winning people to regard the Buddha and the Christ as fellow-laborers, and not as rivals. ~ Annie Besant

There is no life without consciousness; there is no consciousness without life. ~ Annie Besant

The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of reconstruction. First builded into the astral form in the womb of the mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from it; with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it. ~ Annie Besant

Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought. ~ Annie Besant

'Nature is conquered by obedience' - and her resistless energies are at our bidding, as soon as we, by knowledge, work with them and not against them. We can choose out of her boundless stores the forces that serve our purpose in momentum, in direction, and so on, and their very invariability becomes the guarantee of our success. ~ Annie Besant

If my interlocutor desires to convince me that Jupiter has inhabitants, and that his description of them is accurate, it is for him to bring forward evidence in support of his contention. The burden of proof evidently lies on him; it is not for me to prove that no such beings exist before my non-belief is justified, but for him to prove that they do exist before my belief can be fairly claimed. Similarly, it is for the affirmer of God's existence to bring evidence in support of his affirmation; the burden of proof lies on him. ~ Annie Besant

Children of India, I am here to speak to you to-day about some practical things, and my object in reminding you about the glories of the past is simply this. Many times have I been told that looking into the past only degenerates and leads to nothing, and that we should look to the future. That is true. But out of the past is built the future. Look back, therefore, as far as you can, drink deep of the eternal fountains that are behind, and after that, look forward, march forward, and make India brighter, greater, much higher than she ever was. Our ancestors were great. We must recall that. We must learn the elements of our being, the blood that courses in our veins; we must have faith in that blood, and what it did in the past: and out of that faith, and consciousness of past greatness, we must build an India yet greater than what she has been. And ~ Annie Besant

A profound impression was created by the discourses of Professor GN Chakravarti and Mrs Besant, who is said to have risen to unusual heights of eloquence, so exhilarating were the influences of the gathering. Besides those who represented our society and religions, especially Vivekananda, VR Gandhi, Dharmapala, captivated the public, who had only heard of Indian people through the malicious reports of interested missionaries, and were now astounded to see before them and hear men who represented the ideal of spirituality and human perfectibility as taught in their respective sacred writings. ~ Henry Olcott

The world, with all its beauty, its happiness and suffering, its joys and pains, is planned with the utmost ingenuity, in order that the powers of the Self may be shown forth in manifestation. ~ Annie Besant

The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution. ~ Annie Besant

No durable things are built on violent passion. Nature grows her plants in silence and in darkness, and only when they have become strong do they put their heads above the ground. ~ Annie Besant

The mental body, like the astral, varies much in different people; it is composed of coarser or of finer matter, according to the needs of the more or less unfolded consciousness connected with it. In the educated it is active and well-defined; in the undeveloped it is cloudy and inchoate. ~ Annie Besant

It is not monogamy when there is one legal wife, and mistresses out of sight. ~ Annie Besant

Man is ever searching for the source whence he has come, searching for the life which is upwelling within him, immortal, nay, eternal and divine; and every religion is the answer from the Universal Spirit to the seeking spirits of men that came forth from Him. ~ Annie Besant

Quick condemnation of all that is not ours, of views with which we disagree, of ideas that do not attract us, is the sign of a narrow mind, of an uncultivated intelligence. Bigotry is always ignorant, and the wise boy, who will become the wise man, tries to understand and to see the truth in ideas with which he does not agree. ~ Annie Besant

To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child. ~ Annie Besant

In morals, theosophy builds its teachings on the unity, seeing in each form the expression of a common life, and therefore the fact that what injures one injures all. To do evil i.e., to throw poison into the life-blood of humanity, is a crime against the unity. ~ Annie Besant

Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc. ~ Annie Besant

This coarse and insulting way of regarding woman, as though they existed merely to be the safety-valves of men's passions, and that the best men were above the temptation of loving them, has been the source of unnumbered evils. ~ Annie Besant

Death cannot touch the higher consciousness of man ... it can only separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned; the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated from those who have passed onwards, but ... there is no such thing as Death at all. ~ Annie Besant

When a man, a woman, see their little daily tasks as integral portions of the one great work, they are no longer drudges but co-workers with God. ~ Annie Besant

The wanting of advice is the sign that the Spirit in you has not yet spoken with the compelling voice that you ought to obey. ~ Annie Besant

We learn much during our sleep, and the knowledge thus gained slowly filters into the physical brain, and is occasionally impressed upon it as a vivid and illuminative dream. ~ Annie Besant

For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most. ~ Annie Besant

The birth of science rang the death-knell of an arbitrary and constantly interposing Supreme Power. ~ Annie Besant

The orthodox believers in God are divided into two camps, one of which maintains that the existence of God is as demonstrable as any mathematical proposition, while the other asserts that his existence is not demonstrable to the intellect. ~ Annie Besant

There is much, of course, in the exclusive claims of Christianity which make it hostile to other faiths. ~ Annie Besant

Thought creates character. ~ Annie Besant

A prophet is always much wider than his followers, much more liberal than those who label themselves with his name. ~ Annie Besant

An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future. ~ Annie Besant

The Atheist waits for proof of God. Till that proof comes he remains, as his name implies, without God. His mind is open to every new truth, after it has passed the warder Reason at the gate. ~ Annie Besant

Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and - as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis - emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness. ~ Annie Besant

Hasidism has a tradition that one of man's purposes is to assist God in the work of redemption by "hallowing" the things of creation. By a tremendous heave of his spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into that rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst. Keeping the subsoil world under trees in mind, in intelligence, is the least I can do. ~ Annie Dillard

There's always darkness around, and if you focus on the darkness, you don't know where to go. But if you direct yourself at the light - there it is! It's right there. ~ Annie Lennox

He drew closer and brushed the back of his fingers over her cheek, remembering the first night they'd met. Such courage and fighting skill spoke to his soul. It was love at first punch. ~ Annie Nicholas

I've been walking about London for the last thirty years, and I find something fresh in it every day. ~ Walter Besant

Forty-five years, these people were provided for. Not with much, you understand, but there weren't beggars in the streets or homeless people. Now everyone must figure out a new way to make a living. Selling hats or popcorn or flowers or coffee, there's not much difference. They're scared. ~ Annie Ward

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add - until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use. ~ Annie Dillard