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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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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
Whole
Ought
Century
Responsibility
Moral
Lying
Action
Centuries
Two
Sentences
Someone
Evolution

More quotes by Annie Besant

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Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining.
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The wanting of advice is the sign that the Spirit in you has not yet spoken with the compelling voice that you ought to obey.
Annie Besant
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Knowledge is essential to conquest only according to our ignorance are we helpless. Thought creates character. Character can dominate conditions. Will creates circumstances and environment.
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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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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.
Annie Besant
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Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought.
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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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
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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
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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
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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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Control of the tongue! Vital for the man who would try to tread the Path, for no harsh or unkind word, no hasty impatient phrase, may escape from the tongue which is consecrated to service, and which must not injure even an enemy for that which wounds has no place in the Kingdom of Love.
Annie Besant
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There is much, of course, in the exclusive claims of Christianity which make it hostile to other faiths.
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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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
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Beauty is no dead thing. It is the manifestation of God in nature. There is not one object in nature untouched by man that is not beautiful, for God's manifestation is beauty. It shines through all His works, and not only in those that may give pleasure to man.
Annie Besant
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The essence of religion is the knowledge of God which is eternal life. That and nothing less than that is religion. Everything else is on the surface, is superfluous save for the needs of men.
Annie Besant
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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
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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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All men die. You may say: 'Is that encouraging?' Surely yes, for when a man dies, his blunders, which are of the form, all die with him, but the things in him that are part of the life never die, although the form be broken.
Annie Besant