Annie Besant Quotes
Someone ought to do it, but why should I? Someone ought to do it, so why not I? Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.
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.
No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
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.
India is the mother of religion. In her are combined science and religion in perfect harmony, and that is the Hindu religion, and it is India that shall be again the spiritual mother of the world.
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.
The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity.
Knowledge is essential to conquest; only according to our ignorance are we helpless. Thought creates character. Character can dominate conditions. Will creates circumstances and environment.
Nature is always lavish of her gifts even to the most insignificant forms. The butterflies and moths are richly dowered in this respect.
A common religion is not possible for India, but a recognition of a common basis for all religions, and the growth of a liberal, tolerant spirit in religious matters, are possible.
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.
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.
Celibacy is not natural to men or to women; all bodily needs require their legitimate satisfaction, and celibacy is a disregard of natural law.
Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
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.
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.
Continents may break up, continents may emerge, but the human race is immortal in its origin and in its growth, and there is nothing to be afraid of, even if the foundations of the earth be moved.
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.
Never yet was a nation born that did not begin in the spirit, pass to the heart and the mind, and then take an outer form in the world of men.
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.
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.
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.
What is the constitution of the universe? The universe is the manifestation of the divine thought; the thought of God embodies itself in the thought-forms that we call worlds.
What, after all, is the object of education? To train the body in health, vigor and grace, so that it may express the emotions in beauty and the mind with accuracy and strength.
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.
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.
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.
The Buddha over and over again spoke clearly and definitely on post-mortem states - as in his conversation with Vasetta.
After death we live for some time in the astral world in the astral body used during our life on earth, and the more we learn to control and use it wisely now the better for us after death.
Islam believes in many prophets, and Al Quran is nothing but a confirmation of the old Scriptures.
As the heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory, perception, judgment, emotion, and will, differ from the brain which is the instrument of thought.
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.
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.
There is much, of course, in the exclusive claims of Christianity which make it hostile to other faiths.
Man peoples his current living space with a world of his own, crowded with the offspring of his fancies, desires, impulses, and passions.
Every person, every race, every nation, has its own particular keynote which it brings to the general chord of life and of humanity.
The birth of science rang the death-knell of an arbitrary and constantly interposing Supreme Power.
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.
I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness.
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.
Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge.
The idea that Buddhism denies what is called in the West individual immortality is a mistake, so far as the Buddhist scriptures are concerned.