Annie Besant

“ The better your thought, the better will be your life. The truer your thought, the more candid and transparent will be your actions. But remember that it must be your own thought, and not the thought of your neighbour, not the thought of authority, not the thought of a book, however ancient and however sacred, not the thought of a great man, however true for him; the thought that moulds conduct is the thought of the actor, and every man is responsible for his own thinking; the repetition of the thought of another is useless and even mischievous. ”

“ That is the agony of the Soul whose will is set to the Right, but who does not know the Right under the conditions which surround him. What does it mean? It means that he lacks experience. For Conscience, that which tells you "this is Right, that is Wrong," is only the accumulated experience of your past, which has registered certain facts in the nature that you bring into the world with you as that fruit of experience. You have murdered—you have suffered; you are born with the instinct that murder is wrong. You have robbed—you have suffered; you are born with the instinct that theft is wrong. ”

“ Why should our flesh be torn that others may walk in ease?"—my answer is: "Unless the Spirit is so unfolded in you that the path of progress is to you the path of happiness, so that when the feet are bleeding, when the flesh is tortured, you can look up with a smile and say: 'Lord, I have come to do Thy will'; until the path to you is the only path of happiness, you had better tread the accustomed ways of the men and women around you."
For there is a time in evolution, when all wish for aught the world can give has vanished from the human Spirit ”

“ But if you realise Brotherhood then you come to a new conception. You imagine the building of a social system, in which every man who is born into it shall have the opportunity of developing every faculty he brings with him into the world. A social system wherein from every member of the Society there shall be demanded social service according to his capacity, and to every member shall be given social helping according to his needs. You change the law of struggle into the law of life; you change the brute law of the struggle for existence into the social law of sacrifice. ”

“ It is admirable for a man to struggle against temptation, to see him fighting against his lower nature. He is a hero in the struggle. But greater than the man who struggles is the man who has transcended the struggle, and who does the Right naturally, because he loves the Law and feels no inclination to turn towards wrong. That is not so often remembered. The man who has conquered in past lives, the man who has risen above the temptations that his younger brother struggles against, he is at a higher stage of evolution, for he chooses with full conviction the concord with the will of God. ”

“ A portion of Īshvara Himself, a fragment of that illimitable Life, thrown down into the world of Matter, which incases the fragment within itself, which that fragment is destined to turn into a vehicle for the unfolded powers of God. As a seed is cast into the ground and within that seed lie hidden every power, every beauty, every possibility of the tree that sent it forth, so from the eternal Tree of Life of God Himself the seed is cast into the soil of our world, impotent, helpless, nescient—knowing nothing at first. ”

“ In God all is; in man all becomes; but that is the only difference; and what you call causation is nothing more than the unfolding in time, which is succession, of that which ever exists out of time in the Supreme. Let us then see how the law works, and it works through many stages, it works through endless ages. We have our Divine Seed—a child-Spirit, let us call him—born into our world. He is not left there alone, to find out by long experience only how evolution must proceed ”

“ He has many loves and hates, many unjust desires, but also some higher aspirations; and as he goes through a life, the result of his own past, he gathers together fresh experiences, whereof presently more faculty will be manufactured. Just as a sea-gull, sweeping through the air, sweeps down into the ocean, catches a fish, comes up again and flies away to feed upon the fish, so does the human being, out of the great expanse of life in the higher world, sweep down into physical existence to gain the food of experience there. ”

“ For Justice is the Divine Law. Those who oppress shall be oppressed; those who trample shall be trampled on; those who make others outcastes shall be outcastes themselves. Until you obey the law of Brotherhood in your dealings with these younger brothers, ignorant, degraded, helpless, you will not win the smile of the Ḍeva of India, nor have His mighty force running upon your side to redeem. ”

“ There lies the truth. You feel distaste for the lower only when you have seen the higher. When you have seen the Supreme Beauty, the fragments of that Beauty down here can no longer mislead; you see God in them, and keep a grateful memory of all that they have taught you, in that they have led to the realisation of the God hidden in them, the treasure which remains. When you have gained the knowledge, the realisation of God, what has earth left, that earth can give? He is all power ”

“ You find that every great Empire of the later past has been built on a foundation of the misery of the lowest of the people. You find that the vast majority in these Empires were slaves—slaves in name, as well as in reality. Brotherhood was denied; the weak were trampled on; strength was used to plunder and not to cherish; with the result that every such Empire has faded from the pages of history. When we want to know their stories we have to burrow in their sepulchres, for they built against the Law of Brotherhood, and the Law has broken them into pieces, and they are dead. ”

“ The law of forgiveness, the law of returning good for evil, is the law for the man aspiring to lead a spiritual life. It is a duty on the Path of Holiness; it is a duty of one aspiring to become a Saint or a Yogī. It is the law for the individual conduct which raises the man from the brute to the God; but for the State, that is not the law. For the Nation, the stage of evolution has not yet been reached which can return good for evil, and allow an enemy to overrun the country and to have his will upon the people. ”

“ There are two ways of finding out the existence of a law. One, the way in which, surrounded by the laws of nature that we may not change nor violate, unknowing that they exist, unconscious that they are around us, we are like a man in a darkened chamber, where there is no light to see his environment, who knocks himself up against one thing or another and bruises himself in the knocking. ”

“ In the boundless realms of space, in the infinity of Universes, that One is expressing Himself in countless ways, but all is a manifestation of Himself. He the One Thinker; from Him, all thought comes forth. He, the one Actor; from Him all activities proceed. All our human words of right and wrong, of good and evil, those are limited to the evolving lives in relation to each other. There is nothing that can be excluded from the One and Universal. ”

“ He is all beauty; He is all love; and you learn to know that nothing that has attracted42 you can perish in its permanent reality. Although the form may break, and change into another, it only increases your treasure in the riches of the Supreme. You love a woman; it is well; for love is the great purifier and the great uplifter of human hearts; but remember that her loveliness is but a fragment of the Divine Loveliness, and that all that attracts in her is the beauty of the Self shining forth through the beauty of the form. ”

“ Now if you realise these great truths, you will understand how morality must change with the upward evolution of the individual man. When you see wrong-doing in the undeveloped, when you see evil in the savage—whether the savage who is an anachronism in civilised society, or the savage who in his own native conditions—you will realise that that man is only beginning to learn the lessons of morality, and must learn them by dashing himself against the laws he knows not. ”

“ And if you let your youths grope through their studies without knowledge of religion, of what avail to build a temple which will be left empty by them in their manhood? It is the young who need training in religion and in morality, and such education is stopped for lack of the Vaishya liberality. Education is left in the hands of Government, whereas it is the duty of the householders of the Nation. Education under National control, Education in which religion shall form an integral part of the curriculum, that is what India is demanding to-day, and what many are struggling to gain. ”

“ Now what is meant by the word "Equality"? If it be meant that all men are equal in their origin, that every man is born of the Divine Nature, that every man ultimately will reach the manifested Divinity, in that sense Equality is true. We all come forth from God, we all return to God, bearing with us the harvest of our long evolution, having unfolded potentiality into power. In the beginning and the ending, men are equal, equally divine in their beginning, equally divine in their ending; there all men stand on a common platform. ”

“ Go among the sinners, the foul, and the debased, and raise them up to your own purity, and so let the whole nation be pure and educated and healthy and well-fed. And of this be sure—it is written in a Christian Scripture, and is written hundreds of times in your own—"God has made of one blood all the Nations of the earth." Is there one man among you who has not the right to lift up his eyes and say to Brahman: "I am Thou"? Is there one man to whom we can deny the glory of the indwelling Divinity of Spirit? ”

“ Now of all the ancient Empires, Babylonia, Assyria, Nineveh, Egypt, Greece, Rome, all these have passed away; only one Nation remains of that splendid circle of civilisations in the past; only one people, contemporary with those mighty Empires, is still a living Nation; they are dead, nay, they are buried, and only the fragments of their bones remain; but one of their contemporaries lives in our modern days, for the India, that traded with Babylonia in the might of her prosperity, is a living Nation in the twentieth century. ”

“ Ah! that is a worse enemy than any outside pressure, for the outer you can resist, but the inner saps the very essence of your strength; the time comes when you are able to say: "Right or Wrong, whether it leads me to heaven or to hell, I follow the Inner Voice, which is the best guide I have; and, if it leads me wrong to-day, I shall know the Right by my blunder to-morrow." I know that means courage beyond the normal, but that is the courage that the Martyrs have shown, and posterity rewards them, if contemporaries destroy them. ”

“ Torn by the agony of longing, frustrated by the impossibility of gratification, there is branded on that soul, as with a red-hot iron: "It is foolish to yield to gratification that brings about the misery that now I am suffering." He has to starve out the craving by non-satisfaction, and the agonies of starvation are his doom. And so is impressed on the lasting memory of the man the knowledge that suffering follows on the undue gratification of the passions of the body. ”

“ These questions, that on these four mornings we are to consider, are not questions of the passing time, but are the problems that confront humanity at all the stages of its evolution. Not only is that so, but in this alone can we find peace, amid the turmoil of the world; not in the constant struggles of outer life may peace be found, but in the heart of peace which abides in the Eternal, that can remain peaceful in the midst of storms, amid friends, amid enemies, amid neutrals; only in the Peace of the Eternal may the human Spirit find abiding rest. ”

“ If you are wise, your duty is to make others wise, and not to sit in your own study and enjoy the wisdom as though it were a miser's treasure to gloat over. Knowledge that is not shared becomes a cancer in the brain, and the power to know diminishes and is finally lost, when you refuse to share with your ignorant brother that which you acquired from the boundless stores of Nature. ”

“ Thus, by study of the Divine Will in Evolution, by trying to see where one stands in the long climbing upwards, every man ultimately, must be the supreme and final judge of Right and Wrong for himself.
But remember: you should not blame your neighbour because he does not see with your eyes. You should not despise those who think you are wrong, but weigh their blame, and see how much of reason there is therein. Remember also that in this struggle upwards, full weight should be given to the experience of the race as well as to your own. ”