01c. 1890 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
03c. 1890 ADThe Atheist waits for proof of God. Till that proof comes he remains, as his name implies, without God. His mind is open to every new truth, after it has passed the warder Reason at the gate.Annie Besant / quote ↗
04c. 1890 ADNo philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.Annie Besant / quote ↗
05c. 1890 ADNever forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country to meet many a joy to find many a comrade to win and lose many a battle.Annie Besant / quote ↗
06c. 1890 ADWe 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1890 ADWhat, 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 / quote ↗
08c. 1890 ADI have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness.Annie Besant / quote ↗
09c. 1890 ADDeath 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1890 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1890 ADQuick condemnation of all that is not ours, of views with which we disagree, of ideas that do not attract us, is the sign of a narrow mind, of an uncultivated intelligence. Bigotry is always ignorant, and the wise boy, who will become the wise man, tries to understand and to see the truth in ideas with which he does not agree.Annie Besant / quote ↗
12c. 1890 ADMan is a spiritual intelligence, who has taken flesh with the object of gaining experience in worlds below the spiritual, in order that he may be able to master and to rule them, and in later ages take his place in the creative and directing hierarchies of the universe.Annie Besant / quote ↗
13c. 1890 ADStrange 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1890 ADMen are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.Annie Besant / quote ↗
16c. 1890 ADYou 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1890 ADMan 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 / quote ↗
18c. 1890 ADLet Indian history be set side by side with Europe history with what there is of the latter century by century and let us see whether India need blush at the comparison.Annie Besant / quote ↗
19c. 1890 AD'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 / quote ↗
20c. 1890 ADThe generous wish to share with all what is precious, to spread broadcast priceless truths, to shut out none from the illumination of true knowledge, has resulted in a zeal without discretion that has vulgarised Christianity, and has presented its teachings in a form that often repels the heart and alienates the intellect.Annie Besant / quote ↗
21c. 1890 ADDebating 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 / quote ↗
22c. 1890 ADWe learn much during our sleep, and the knowledge thus gained slowly filters into the physical brain, and is occasionally impressed upon it as a vivid and illuminative dream.Annie Besant / quote ↗
23c. 1890 ADLiberty 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 / quote ↗
24c. 1890 ADAmong the various vernaculars that are spoken in different parts of India, there is one that stands out strongly from the rest, as that which is most widely known. It is Hindi. A man who knows Hindi can travel over India and find everywhere Hindi-speaking people.Annie Besant / quote ↗
