Quotes from Annie Besant

The peril was pressing; the menace unmistakable. The

What Religion has to face in the controversies of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the educated conscience and of the soaring intellect;

Even the outer God must hide, ere the Inner God can manifest; the cry of agony of the Crucified must be wrung from the tortured lips; "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" precedes the realisation of the God within.

There was a time when any idea of voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of recognising that Providence works through the common sense of individual brains.

To look at food and say that it is good will not satisfy a starving man; he must put forth his hand and eat. So to hear the Master's words is not enough; you must do what He says, attending to every word, taking every hint".

Así un buen pensamiento se mantiene como una fuerza activa y benéfica, y uno malo como un maléfico

The Lord comes forth to restore that which had been disturbed of the balanced interworking of the three gunas and to make again such balance between them as shall enable evolution to go forward smoothly and not be checked in its progress.

The evolution of force can only be made by struggle, by combat, by effort, by exercise, and inasmuch as I´shvara is building men and not babies, He must draw out men's forces by pulling against their strength, making them struggle in order to attain, and so vivifying into outer manifestation the life that otherwise would remain enfolded in itself.

Were everything around us smooth and easy, we would remain supine, lethargic, indifferent. It is the whip of pain, of suffering, of disappointment, that drives us onward and brings out the forces of our internal life which otherwise would remain undeveloped.

Veiling Himself in the form of an outcaste—for to Him all forms are the same, the human differences are but as the grains of sand which vanish before the majesty of His greatness.

That is why there are forces which you call evil. In this universe there is no evil; all is good that comes to us from I´shvara, but it sometimes comes in the guise of evil that, by opposing it, we may draw out our strength.

You always look at the things of the spirit with the eyes of the flesh. What you ought to do is to look at the things of the flesh with the eyes of the spirit.

The more ignorant the man, the more he thinks he can grasp. The less he understands, the more he resents being told that there are some things beyond the grasp of his intellect, existences so mighty that he cannot even dream of the lowest of the attributes that mark them out.

Heaven is not far away from us, but surrounds us on every side, and we are shut out from it by our incapacity to feel its vibrations, not their absence.

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.

So we have school after school, philosophy after philosophy, each one showing an aspect of truth, and ignoring, or even denying, the other aspects which are equally true. Nor is this all; as the age in which we are passes on from century to century, from millennium to millennium, knowledge becomes dimmer, spiritual insight becomes rarer, those who repeat far out-number those who know;

The prophet—coming forth from time to time with the divine word hot as fire on his lips—speaks out the ancient truth and illuminates tradition. But they who cling to the words of tradition are apt to be blinded by the light of the fire and to call out "heretic" against the one who speaks the truth that they have lost.

But not devotion alone marks this great One who is climbing his divine path. He must also be, as I´shvara is, a lover of humanity. Unless within him there burns the flame of love for men—nay, men, do I say? it is too narrow—unless within him burns the flame of love for everything that exists, moving and unmoving, in this universe

He finds in them many texts that do not fit into the narrow framework that he has made; and because he too often cares for the framework more than for the truth, he manipulates the text until he can make it fit in, in some dislocated fashion.

Islam believes in many prophets, and Al Quran is nothing but a confirmation of the old Scriptures.

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.

I often think that woman is more free in Islam than in Christianity. Woman is more protected by Islam than by the faith which preaches monogamy. In AI Quran the law about woman is juster and more liberal.

At the solemn moment of death, every man, even when death is sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled before him, in its minutest details. For one short instant the personal becomes one with the individual and all-knowing ego. But this instant is enough to show to him the whole chain of causes which have been at work during his life.

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.