"I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living
again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls
of the dead are in existence."—Socrates
"The soul comes from without into the human
body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew .
. . it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal."—Ralph
Waldo Emerson
"As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously
referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence."—Henry
David Thoreau
"I know I am deathless . . . We have thus
far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, / There are trillions
ahead, and trillions ahead of them."—Walt Whitman
Jefferson wrote 'All men ARE created equal. But,
all men are NOT born equal.'
Doctrine of reincarnation is neither absurd nor
useless. "It is not more surprising to be born twice than
once."—Voltaire
"I am certain that I have been here as I
am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand
times."—Goethe
"I did not begin when I was born, nor when
I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable
myriads of millenniums . . . All my previous selves have their
voices, echoes, promptings in me . . . Oh, incalculable times
again shall I be born."—Jack London
"There is no death. How can there be death
if everything is part of the Godhead? The soul never dies and
the body is never really alive."—Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Nobel Laureate
"He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand
relationships . . . become newly born. Each one was mortal, a
passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none
of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually
had a new face: only time stood between one face and another."—Herman
Hesse, Nobel Laureate
"As we live through thousands of dreams
in out present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands
of such lives which we enter from the other more real life . .
. and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams
of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very
last one, the very real life of God."—Count Leo Tolstoy
"Do you have any idea how many lives we
must have gone through before we even got the first idea that
there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the
Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! . . . We choose our
next world though what we learn in this one . . . But you, Jon,
learned so much at one time that you didn't have to go through
a thousand lives to reach this one."—Richard Bach,
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
"Finding myself to exist in the world, I
believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist."
—Benjamin Franklin
"Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition
of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of
the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man
was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his
first entrance into life."—Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th
century German philosopher
"The souls must reenter the absolute substance
whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this, they must develop
all the perfections, the germ of which is planted in them; and
if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they
must commence another, a third, and so forth, until they have
acquired the condition which fits them for reunion with God."—Zohar,
one of the principal Cabalistic texts
"I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was
man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?"—Jalalu
'D-Din Rumi, Sufi poet
"The soul is not the body and it may be
in one body or in another, and pass from body to body."
—Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher during Renaissance
sentenced to be burned at the stake by the Inquisition for his
teachings about reincarnation
"It is a secret of the world that all things
subsist and so not die, but only retire a little from sight
and afterwards return again . . . Nothing is dead; men feign themselves
dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there
they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some
new and strange disguise."—Emerson (The Selected Writings
of Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"All human beings go through a previous
life . . . Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven
occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that
silence and solitude whose starry plains are but the vestibule
of spiritual worlds?"—Honore Balzac (Seraphita)
"We all have some experience of a feeling,
that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing
having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our
having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects,
and circumstances."—Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)
"Genius is experience. Some seem to think
that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience
in many lives."—Henry Ford
"Some people believe that we go on living
in another body after death, that we lived before. They call it
reincarnation. That we all lived before on the earth thousands
of years ago or on some other planet. They say we have forgotten
it. Some say they remember their past lives."—James
Joyce (Ulysses)
"I could well imagine that I might have
lived in former centuries and there encountered questions in was
not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I
had not fulfilled the task that was given to me."—Carl
Jung
"The doctrine of transmigration . . . was
a means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of
the cosmos to man; . . . none but very hasty thinkers will reject
it on the grounds of inherent absurdity."—Thomas Huxley
"Let us face it: 'deep down' nobody in his
right mind can visualize his own existence without assuming that
he has always lived and will live hereafter."—American
psychoanalyst Erik Erikson
"It's so silly. All you do is get the heck
out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done
it thousands of times. Just because they don't remember, it doesn't
mean they haven't done it."
—J. D. Salinger
"I hold that when a person dies / His soul
returns again to earth; / Arrayed in some new flesh disguise /
Another mother gives him birth / With sturdier limbs and brighter
brain."—John Masefield
"Friends are all souls that we've known
in other lives. We're drawn to each other. That's how I feel about
friends. Even if I have only known them a day, it doesn't matter.
I'm not going to wait till I have known them for two years, because
anyway, we must have met somewhere before, you know."—George
Harrison
"Has it occurred to you that transmigration
is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the
world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed
in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope
that if in this one we strive toward virtue out future lives will
be less afflicted."—W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's
Edge
"The soul is not born; it does not die;
it was not produced from anyone . . . Unborn, eternal, it is not
slain, though the body is slain."—Emerson quoting Katha
Upanisad
"I am no Hindu, but I hold the doctrine
of the Hindus concerning a future state (rebirth) to be incomparably
more rational, more pious, and more likely to deter men from vice
than the horrid opinions inculcated by Christians on punishments
without end."—William Jones |