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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

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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
Right
Thus
Fairest
Men
Figure
Noblest
Projects
Qualities
Figures
Ideal
Create
Project
Quality
Pick
Ennobled
Call
Picks
Magnified
Space
Ideals
Purified

More quotes by Annie Besant

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Britons are good, though often brutal, colonists where they come into relations with entirely uncivilized tribes whose past is so remote as to be forgotten. But they trample with their heavy boots over the sensitive, delicate susceptibilities of an ancient, highly civilized and cultured nation, such as India.
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Matter is, in its constituent elements, the same as spirit existence is one, however manifold in its phenomena life is one, however multiform in its evolution.
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The birth of science rang the death-knell of an arbitrary and constantly interposing Supreme Power.
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The orthodox believers in God are divided into two camps, one of which maintains that the existence of God is as demonstrable as any mathematical proposition, while the other asserts that his existence is not demonstrable to the intellect.
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'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.
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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.'
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The sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of it into the twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period of our incarceration at death we step out of the prison again into the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality.
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A prophet is always much wider than his followers, much more liberal than those who label themselves with his name.
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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 Besant
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God' is always the equivalent of 'I do not know.
Annie Besant
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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
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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
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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
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The soul grows by reincarnation in bodies provided by nature, more complex, more powerful, as the soul unfolds greater and greater faculties. And so the soul climbs upward into the light eternal. And there is no fear for any child of man, for inevitably he climbs towards God.
Annie Besant
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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.
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It is not monogamy when there is one legal wife, and mistresses out of sight.
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The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.
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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
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Let Indian history be set side by side with Europe history with what there is of the latter century by century and let us see whether India need blush at the comparison.
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