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

Annie Besant

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Annie Besant
Age: 86 †
Born: 1847
Born: January 1
Died: 1933
Died: January 1
Editor
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Member Of The London School Board
Orator
Politician
Suffragist
Theosophist
Writer
London
England
Annie Wood Besant
Annie Wood
Annie Besant
Experience
Denial
Given
Limited
Believe
Absurd
Rational
Proof
Ignorance
Outside
Position
Refusal

More quotes by Annie Besant

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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
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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
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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
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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
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The destruction of India's village system was the greatest of England's blunders.
Annie Besant
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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
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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
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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
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'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
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My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'
Annie Besant
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.
Annie Besant
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Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.
Annie Besant
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The divine life is the spirit in everything that exists, from the atom to the archangel the grain of dust could not be were God absent from it the loftiest seraph is but a spark from the eternal fire, which is God. Sharers in one life all form one brotherhood. The immanence of God, the solidarity of man, such are the basic truths of theosophy.
Annie Besant
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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