60+ Annie Besant Quotes On Education, Hinduism And Freedom

Annie Besant was an English philosopher and social reformer. She was a prominent figure in the Theosophical Society and was a supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule. She was a strong advocate for women's rights and education, and was a prolific writer and speaker on political, social, and religious topics. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Annie Besant on education, hinduism, freedom.

Top 10 Annie Besant Quotes

1. Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act.
2. There is no life without consciousness; there is no consciousness without life.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Thought creates character.
6. 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.
7. No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
8. 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.
9. The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity.
10. 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.

Annie Besant Short Quotes

• Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining.
• Socialism is the ideal state, but it can never be achieved while man is so selfish.
• Where love rules, laws are not needed.
• Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.
• Purification is but the cleaning of the lamp-glass which hides the Light
• There can be no wise politics without thought beforehand.
• The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.
• God' is always the equivalent of 'I do not know.

Annie Besant Quotes About Education

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

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. — Annie Besant

I will suggest that the great aim of our education is to bring out of the child who comes into our hands every faculty that he brings with him, and then to try to win that child to turn all his abilities, his powers, his capacities, to the helping and serving of the community which is a part. — Annie Besant

Annie Besant Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Nature is always lavish of her gifts even to the most insignificant forms. The butterflies and moths are richly dowered in this respect. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no birthright in the white skin that it shall say that wherever it goes, to any nation, amongst any people, there the people of the country shall give way before it, and those to whom the land belongs shall bow down and become its servants. — 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

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 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

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

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

Man peoples his current living space with a world of his own, crowded with the offspring of his fancies, desires, impulses, and passions. — 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

After a study of some forty years and more of the great religions of the world, I find none so perfect, none so scientific, none so philosophic, and none so spiritual as the great religion known by the name of Hinduism. The more you know it, the more you will love it; the more you try to understand it, the more deeply you will value it — 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

The Buddha over and over again spoke clearly and definitely on post-mortem states - as in his conversation with Vasetta. — Annie Besant

The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Annie Besant

When we realise our oneness with our RULER, then the matter shall have no longer power over us, and we shall see it as the unreality it is. — 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

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

Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle. — Annie Besant

The idea that Buddhism denies what is called in the West individual immortality is a mistake, so far as the Buddhist scriptures are concerned. — 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

Out of right thinking comes right practice. It is not true that it does not matter what a man believes. It is not true to say, as many say, that a man's beliefs do not matter, it is only his conduct which is of importance; no lasting right conduct grows out of wrong belief. If you think falsely, you will act mistakenly; if you think basely, your conduct will suit your thinking. — Annie Besant

No circumstances can ever make or mar the unfolding of the spiritual life. Spirituality does not depend upon the environment; it depends upon one's attitude towards life. — 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

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

Life Lessons by Annie Besant

1. Annie Besant taught that life is a journey of self-discovery, and that one should strive to learn and grow throughout life.
2. She also believed in the power of service to others, and that by helping others we can find true fulfillment in life.
3. Lastly, she encouraged people to think for themselves and to question the status quo, as this is the only way to truly understand the world.