ANNIE BESANT QUOTES
British activist & theosophist (1847-1933)
Within you lies embedded in the marble of your human life the Spirit that is God, hidden beneath the flesh, hidden beneath the bodies, the emotions and the mind, so that it is not visible to the outer eyes. You have not to create that image. It is there. You have not to manufacture it; you have only to set it free.
ANNIE BESANT
There Is No Death
India is a country in which every great religion finds a home.
ANNIE WOOD BESANT
attributed, The Modern Review, 1942
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
The Political Thought of Annie Besant
Were it possible that God should now reveal Himself to us as He is, the Being of Whose Nature we can form no conception, I believe that we should remain as ignorant as we are at present, from the want of faculties to receive that revelation: the Divine language might sound in our ears, but it would be as unintelligible as the roar of the thunder-clap, or the moan of the earthquake, or the whisper of the wind to the leaves of the cedar-tree.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
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 WOOD BESANT
Death--and After
Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act.
ANNIE BESANT
Encyclopedia Indica
Evil is only imperfection, that which is not complete, which is becoming, but has not yet found its end.
ANNIE BESANT
The Immediate Future: Lectures Delivered in Queen's Hall
When you are trying to live the life of the Spirit, you will try to be pure. You do well, but why? In order that you may be pure, and leave your impure brethren in their impurity? Oh no! You must try to be pure, in order that there may be more purity in the world to share amongst all men.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
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 hour-glass--all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors.
ANNIE WOOD BESANT
Death--and After
Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
ANNIE BESANT
Why I Became a Theosophist
Karma brings us ever back to rebirth, binds us to the wheel of births and deaths. Good Karma drags us back as relentlessly as bad, and the chain which is wrought out of our virtues holds as firmly and as closely as that forged from our vices.
ANNIE WOOD BESANT
Karma
As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and God rules over the whole earth.
ANNIE BESANT
The Theosophical Writings of Annie Besant
The true Mystic, realising God, has no need of any Scriptures, for he has touched the source whence all Scriptures flow.
ANNIE BESANT
The Theosophical Writings of 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 WOOD BESANT
Reincarnation
Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science.
ANNIE WOOD BESANT
Introduction to Yoga
That is the true definition of sin; when knowing right you do the lower, ah, then you sin. Where there is no knowledge, sin is not present.
ANNIE BESANT
The Immediate Future: Lectures Delivered in Queen's Hall
And Nature is enough for us, gives us all the light we want and all that we, as yet, are fitted to receive.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
A prophet is always much wider than his followers, much more liberal than those who label themselves with his name.
ANNIE BESANT
Annie Besant: The Life and Teachings of Muhammad
Life is not a monotone but a many-stringed harmony, and to this harmony is contributed a distinctive note by each individual.
ANNIE BESANT
The Birth of New India
The Self in you is the same as the Self Universal. Whatever powers are manifested throughout the world, those powers exist in germ, in latency, in you.... If you realize the unity of the Self amid the diversities of the Not-Self, then Yoga Will not seem an impossible thing to you.
ANNIE WOOD BESANT
Introduction to Yoga