Top 60 Annie Besant Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Where love rules, laws are not needed.”

— Annie Besant

2. “India is the mother of religion. In her are combined science and religion in perfect harmony, and that is the Hindu religion, and it is India that shall be again the spiritual mother of the world.”

— Annie Besant

3. “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.”

— Annie Besant

4. “Purification is but the cleaning of the lamp-glass which hides the Light.”

— Annie Besant

5. “The soul grows by reincarnation in bodies provided by nature, more complex, more powerful, as the soul unfolds greater and greater faculties. And so the soul climbs upward into the light eternal. And there is no fear for any child of man, for inevitably he climbs towards God.”

— Annie Besant

6. “Thought creates character.”

— Annie Besant

7. “The world, with all its beauty, its happiness and suffering, its joys and pains, is planned with the utmost ingenuity, in order that the powers of the Self may be shown forth in manifestation.”

— Annie Besant

8. “After death we live for some time in the astral world in the astral body used during our life on earth, and the more we learn to control and use it wisely now the better for us after death.”

— Annie Besant

9. “No soul that aspires can ever fail to rise; no heart that loves can ever be abandoned. Difficulties exist only that in overcoming them we may grow strong, and they who have suffered are able to save.”

— Annie Besant

Featured in: Strong Quotes

10. “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

11. “Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another.”

— Annie Besant

12. “As the heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory, perception, judgment, emotion, and will, differ from the brain which is the instrument of thought.”

— Annie Besant

13. “There is far more misunderstanding of Islam than there is, I think, of the other religions of the world. So many things are said of it by those who do not belong to that faith.”

— Annie Besant

14. “Not out of right practice comes right thinking, but out of right thinking comes right practice. It matters enormously what you think. If you think falsely, you will act mistakenly; if you think basely, your conduct will suit your thinking.”

— Annie Besant

15. “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

16. “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

17. “There is no life without consciousness; there is no consciousness without life.”

— Annie Besant

18. “What, 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

19. “To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child.”

— Annie Besant

20. “The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity.”

— Annie Besant

21. “An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future.”

— Annie Besant

22. “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

23. “Every person, every race, every nation, has its own particular keynote which it brings to the general chord of life and of humanity.”

— Annie Besant

24. “Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.”

— Annie Besant

25. “God’ is always the equivalent of ‘I do not know.”

— Annie Besant

26. “I will suggest that the great aim of our education is to bring out of the child who comes into our hands every faculty that he brings with him, and then to try to win that child to turn all his abilities, his powers, his capacities, to the helping and serving of the community which is a part.”

— Annie Besant

27. “Nature is always lavish of her gifts even to the most insignificant forms. The butterflies and moths are richly dowered in this respect.”

— Annie Besant

28. “Just as the sun in the heaven is unchanged, but is mirrored as a thousand suns in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, so do you know the Sun of the Spirit within you from the broken reflections that you find in the lower self.”

— Annie Besant

29. “The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.”

— Annie Besant

30. “Socialism is the ideal state, but it can never be achieved while man is so selfish.”

— Annie Besant

31. “When we recognise that unity of all living things, then at once arises the question – how can we support this life of ours with least injury to the lives around us; how can we prevent our own life adding to the suffering of the world in which we live?”

— Annie Besant

32. “In a 50 mile radius around Chicago one can see the red aura of pain, agony, terror, anger from all the animals being butchered there.”

— Annie Besant

33. “Never 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 face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.”

— Annie Besant

34. “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

35. “Religions are branches from a common trunk – Divine Wisdom.”

— Annie Besant

36. “There can be no wise politics without thought beforehand.”

— Annie Besant

37. “In the light of reincarnation life changes its aspect, for it becomes the school of the eternal Man within us, who seeks therein his development, the Man that was and is and shall be, for whom the hour will never strike.”

— Annie Besant

38. “The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.”

— Annie Besant

39. “My deeds must speak for me, for words are too poor.”

— Annie Besant

40. “This coarse and insulting way of regarding woman, as though they existed merely to be the safety-valves of men’s passions, and that the best men were above the temptation of loving them, has been the source of unnumbered evils.”

— Annie Besant

41. “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

42. “No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.”

— Annie Besant

43. “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

44. “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.”

— Annie Besant

45. “Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining.”

— Annie Besant

46. “There is no birthright in the white skin that it shall say that wherever it goes, to any nation, amongst any people, there the people of the country shall give way before it, and those to whom the land belongs shall bow down and become its servants.”

— Annie Besant

47. “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

48. “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

49. “Premonitions, presentiments, the sensing of unseen presences and many allied experiences are due to the activity of the astral body and its reaction on the physical; their ever-increasing frequency is merely the result of its evolution among educated people.”

— Annie Besant

50. “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