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The true basis of morality is utility that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of the general welfare and happiness the endeavour so to rule our lives that we may serve and bless mankind.

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
Action
Serve
Endeavour
True
Actions
Adaptation
May
Morality
Utility
Rule
Promotion
General
Bless
Mankind
Welfare
Happiness
Basis
Lives
Bases

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness.
Annie Besant
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This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker.
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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
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Man is ever searching for the source whence he has come, searching for the life which is upwelling within him, immortal, nay, eternal and divine and every religion is the answer from the Universal Spirit to the seeking spirits of men that came forth from Him.
Annie Besant
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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
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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
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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
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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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I was a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty and a proud self-respect it was while I was this that doubt struck me, and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
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In a deep metaphysical sense, all that is conditioned is illusory. All phenomena are literally 'appearances,' the outer masks in which the One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more 'material' and solid the appearance, the further is it from reality, and therefore the more illusory it is.
Annie Besant
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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
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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
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The body is never more alive than when it is dead but it is alive in its units, and dead in its totality alive as a congeries, dead as an organism.
Annie Besant
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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
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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
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Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge.
Annie Besant