British activist & theosophist (1847-1933)
But we see how these ideas colour men's thoughts and lives, how they cripple their intellect and outrage their hearts, and we rise to trample down these superstitions, not because they are in themselves worth refuting, but simply because they degrade our brother-men.
ANNIE BESANT
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My Path to Atheism
Yoga is a matter of the Spirit and not of the intellect. For just as water will find its way through every obstruction, in order to rise to the level of its source, so does the spirit in man strive upwards ever towards the source whence it came.
ANNIE BESANT
Yoga: The Hatha Yoga and the Raja Yoga
We must notice also that God, who is said to love righteousness, can never crush out righteousness in any-human soul. There is no one so utterly degraded as to be without one sign of good. Among the lowest and vilest of our population, we find beautiful instances of kindly feeling and generous help. Can any woman be more degraded than she who only values her womanhood as a means of gain, who drinks, fights, and steals? Let those who have been among such women say if they have not been cheered sometimes by a very ray of the light of God, when the most. degraded has shown kindness to an equally degraded sister, and when the very gains of sin have been purified by being; poured into the lap of a suffering and dying companion. Shall love and devotion, however feeble, unselfishness and sympathy, however transitory in their action, shall these stars of heaven be quenched in the blackness of the pit of hell? If it be so, then, verily, God is not the "righteous. Lord who loveth righteousness."
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Thus the Rights of Man have become an accepted doctrine, but, unfortunately, they are only rights of man, in the exclusive sense of the word. They are sexual, and not human rights, and until they become human rights, society will never rest on a sure, because just, foundation. Women, as well as men, "are born and remain free and equal in rights;" women, as well as men, have "natural and imprescriptible rights;" for women, as well as for men, "these rights are--liberty, property, safety, and resistance of tyranny." Of these rights only crime should deprive them, just as by crime men also are deprived of them; to deny these rights to women, is either to deny them to humanity qua humanity, or to deny that women form a part of humanity; if women's rights are denied, men's rights have no logical basis, no claim to respect; then tyranny ceases to be a crime, slavery is no longer a scandal; "either all human beings have equal rights, or none have any."
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be
The warmest feelings of Christendom cluster round the Crucifix, and he, the crucified one, is adored with passionate devotion, not as martyr for truth, not as witness for God, not as faithful to death, but as the substitute for his worshippers, as he who bears in their stead the wrath of God, and the punishment due to sin.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Does morality consist in obedience to the will of a perfectly moral Being, and are we to aim at righteousness of life because in so doing we please God? Or are we to lead noble lives because nobility of life is desirable for itself alone, and because it spreads happiness around us and satisfies the desires of our own nature?
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Death is nothing more than the putting off your overcoat, in which you wandered through the street, when you come inside your house and no longer need its protection. It is nothing more than that--the putting off of a garment because it is no longer wanted, because it is no longer useful for the high purposes of the Spirit.
ANNIE BESANT
There Is No Death
Creeds are like iron moulds, into which thought is poured; they may be suitable enough to the way in which they are framed; they may be fit enough to enshrine the phase of thought which designed them; but they are fatally unsuitable and unfit for the days long afterwards, and for the thought of the centuries which succeed.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Anyone who has reached a certain stage of intellectual knowledge will recognise the unity of mankind.... That intellectual recognition of the unity is practically universal among educated people; but very few are prepared to carry out the intellectual recognition into practical life and practical training.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
Belief in hell stifles all inquiry into truth by setting a premium on one form of belief, and by forbidding another under frightful penalties.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
We believe in no wisdom that improves on Nature's laws, and one of those laws, written on our hearts, is that sorrow shall tread on the heels of sin. We are conscious that men should learn to welcome this law, and not to shrink from it. To fly from the suffering following on broken law is the last thing we should do.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
My heart revolts against the spectre of Almighty indifferent to the pain of sentient being. My conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality that surrounds me on every side.
ANNIE BESANT
Indian Political Thought
It may be urged: if divorce is to be so easily attainable, why should there be a marriage contract at all? Both as regards the pair immediately concerned, and as regards the children who may result from the union, a clear and definite contract seems to me to be eminently desirable. It is not to be wished that the union of those on whom depends the next generation should be carelessly and lightly entered into; the dignity and self-recollection which a definite compact implies are by no means to be despised, when it is remembered how grave and weighty are the responsibilities assumed by those who are to give to the State new citizens, and to Humanity new lives, which must be either a blessing or a curse. But the dignity of such a course is not its only, nor, indeed, its main, recommendation. More important is the absolute necessity that the conditions of the union of the two adult lives should be clearly and thoroughly understood between them. No wise people enter into engagements of an important and durable character without a written agreement; a definite contract excludes all chance of disagreement as to the arrangements made, and prevents misunderstandings from arising.
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be
For all the practical purposes of Yoga, the man, the working, conscious man, is so much of him as he cannot separate from the matter enclosing him, or with which he is connected. Only that is body which the man is able to put aside and say: "This is not I, but mine."
ANNIE WOOD BESANT
Introduction to Yoga
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
Annie Besant: An Autobiography
Death is re-arrangement; it is the disassociation of the compounds whose resultant was life; the breaking up of the complex organic products, and their gradual resolution into the simpler inorganic forms; until the living body, with its compounds of wonderful variety and intricacy, is resolved through stage after stage of ever-increasing simplicity into those ultimate fates of all living things, carbon dioxide, water, and ammonia; and then these re-commence the upward building once more.
ANNIE BESANT
Is Christianity a Success?
But through this Armageddon the world will pass into a realm of peace, of brotherhood, of co-operation, and will forget the darkness and the terrors of the night in the joy that cometh in the morning.
ANNIE BESANT
The Theosophist, October 1914
But there is worse than physical torture in the picture of hell; pain is not its darkest aspect. Of all the thoughts with which the heart of man has outraged the Eternal Righteousness, there is none so appalling, none so blasphemous, as that which declares that even one soul, made by the Supreme Good, shall remain during all eternity, under the power of sin. Divines have wearied themselves in describing the horrors of the Christian hell; but it is not the furnace of flames, not the undying worm, not the fire which never may be quenched, that revolt us most; hideous as are these images, they are not the worst terror of hell. Who does not know how St. Francis, believing himself ordained to be lost everlastingly, fell on his knees and cried, "O my God, if I am indeed doomed to hate thee during eternity, at least suffer me to love thee while I live here." To the righteous heart the agony of hell is a far worse one than physical torture could inflict: it is the existence of men and women who might have been saints, shut out from hope of holiness for evermore; God's children, the work of his hands, gnashing their teeth at a Father who has cast them down for ever from the life he might have given; it is Love everlastingly hated; good everlastingly trampled under foot; God everlastingly baffled and defied; worst of all, it is a room in the Father's house where his children may hunger and thirst after righteousness, but never, never, can be filled.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
But marriage, it is said, would be too lightly entered into if it were so easily dissoluble. Why? People do not rush into endless partnerships because they are dissoluble at pleasure; on the contrary, such partnerships last just so long as they are beneficial to the contracting parties. In the same way, marriage would last exactly so long as its continuance was beneficial, and no longer: when it became hurtful, it would be dissolved.
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be
Belief in hell takes all beauty from virtue; who cares for obedience only rendered through fear?
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism