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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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Continents may break up, continents may emerge, but the human race is immortal in its origin and in its growth, and there is nothing to be afraid of, even if the foundations of the earth be moved.
Annie Besant
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Death cannot touch the higher consciousness of man ... it can only separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated from those who have passed onwards, but ... there is no such thing as Death at all.
Annie Besant
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What is a philosophy? It Is an answer satisfactory to the reason to all the great problems of life. That is what is meant by philosophy. It must satisfy the reason, and it must show the unity underlying the endless diversity of the facts that science observes.
Annie Besant
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No circumstances can ever make or mar the unfolding of the spiritual life. Spirituality does not depend upon the environment it depends upon one's attitude towards life.
Annie Besant
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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.
Annie Besant
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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
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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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The Buddha over and over again spoke clearly and definitely on post-mortem states - as in his conversation with Vasetta.
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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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.
Annie Besant
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No durable things are built on violent passion. Nature grows her plants in silence and in darkness, and only when they have become strong do they put their heads above the ground.
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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One of the great advantages of cremation - apart from all sanitary conditions - lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the material elements composing the physical and astral corpses, brought about by the burning.
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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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.'
Annie Besant
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The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity.
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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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
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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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What is the constitution of the universe? The universe is the manifestation of the divine thought the thought of God embodies itself in the thought-forms that we call worlds.
Annie Besant