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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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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
Practice
Religion
Adherents
Best
Teachings
Take
Practices
Always
Lowest
Highest
Teaching
Worst

More quotes by 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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Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining.
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Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist, the only difference between a living and a dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent.
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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Strange indeed would it be if all the space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the inhabitants of Earth the only forms in which intelligence could clothe itself.
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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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
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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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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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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
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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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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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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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Thought creates character.
Annie Besant
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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
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Debating clubs among boys are very useful, not only as affording pleasant meetings and interesting discussions, but also as serving for training grounds for developing the knowledge and the qualities that are needed in public life.
Annie Besant
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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.
Annie Besant
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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
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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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Purification is but the cleaning of the lamp-glass which hides the Light
Annie Besant