Quote

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

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

More quotes by Annie Besant

Image
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
Image
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.
Annie Besant
Image
Representative institutions are as much a part of the true Briton as his language and his literature.
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
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
Theosophy tries to bridge the gulf between Buddhism and Christianity by pointing to the fundamental spiritual truths on which both religions are built, and by winning people to regard the Buddha and the Christ as fellow-laborers, and not as rivals.
Annie Besant
Image
I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness.
Annie Besant
Image
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
Image
Thought creates character.
Annie Besant
Image
Man peoples his current living space with a world of his own, crowded with the offspring of his fancies, desires, impulses, and passions.
Annie Besant
Image
Nothing but an imperious intellectual and moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very being quivers and sways under the shock.
Annie Besant
Image
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
Image
What, after all, is the object of education? To train the body in health, vigor and grace, so that it may express the emotions in beauty and the mind with accuracy and strength.
Annie Besant
Image
For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.
Annie Besant
Image
The destruction of India's village system was the greatest of England's blunders.
Annie Besant
Image
Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and - as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis - emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness.
Annie Besant
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining.
Annie Besant
Image
'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