Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Freedom
Give
Home
Devoted
Back
Ancient
Giving
India
Make
Since
Life
Came
Purpose

More quotes by Annie Besant

Image
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
Image
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
Image
We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, 'magnified' Man.
Annie Besant
Image
The highest Hindu intellectual training was based on the practice of yoga, and produced, as its fruit, those marvellous philosophical systems, the six Darshanas and the Brahma Sutras, which are still the delight of scholars and the inspiration of occultists and mystics.
Annie Besant
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Annie Besant
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
God' is always the equivalent of 'I do not know.
Annie Besant
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Evil is only imperfection, that which is not complete, which is becoming, but has not yet found its end.
Annie Besant