Commentary
It is fascinating to read what other writers
have written about the concept of reincarnation, and how
remarkable the drum roll of names - famous intellectuals,
who have considered reincarnation a serious doctrine and
acceptable philosophy about life. Reincarnation: The Phoenix
Fire is a treasure trove of insightful thoughts from all
over the world, about what reincarnation may imply and
what evidence there is extant on the possibility that life
may happen more than once.
Quotes
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
-William Wordsworth p126
To live is by universal consent to travel a rough road. And
how can a rough road which leads nowhere be worth the travelling?
Mere living, what a profitless performance, mere painful living,
what an absurd! -Preface
It is timely, is it not, for the scientist to peer over
the edge of his physical foundations and ask: What,
if anything, may follow the final obliterating blast? p302
To be alive, actually existing, to have emerged from
darkness and silence, to be here to-day is certainly
incredible. A philosopher friend of mine could never,
he told me, bring himself to believe in his own existence.
-W. Macneile Dixon p114
If immortality be untrue, it matters little whether
anything else be true or not.
-Henry Buckle
It must be so, - Plato, thou reasonest well! Else
whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, this
longing after immortality? p124
The simple fact that [reincarnation] was probably the opinion
both of Plato and of Virgil shows that there is nothing here
which is alien to the best reason or to the highest instincts
of men.
-F.W.H. Myers p137
Every man feels doubtless that his little mortal life is
very inadequate, and that to express and give utterance
to all that is in him would need many lives, many
bodies...
-Edward Carpenter p109
Love is stronger than death. Not any dogmas of any
religion, not any philosophy, nothing in this world,
nothing in the next, shall prevent him who loves from
the certainty of rejoining some time the soul he loves...
-H. Fielding Hall p111
Into the daily flow of earthly things,
Instincts of good - immediate sympathies,
Places come at by chance, that claim at once
An old acquaintance - single random looks
That bare a stranger's bosom to our eyes;
We know these things are so, we ask not why,
But act and follow as the Dream goes on.
-Richard Milnes p132
Would it not be worth much to hope that what
we missed in one life might come to us in another? p113
...his view that every human soul passes, like Ulysses,
through many terrors and difficulties in the pursuit
of self-reliance and deeper understanding. p266
They will come back, come back again, as long as the
red Earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree.
Do you think he would squander souls?
-Rudyard Kipling p152
But when a lively chord in the soul is struck, when
the windows for a moment are unbarred, the long and
varied past is recovered. p239
Natural aptitudes, special faculties, vocations,
are the traces of impressions formerly received, of
knowledge already acquired... p291
I am certain that I have been here as I am now a
thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand
times.
-J.W. von Goethe p178
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 p186
The fact that people often recognize, as familiar,
scenes and landscapes which they see for the first
time, is adduced by some as proof of rebirth. viii
How come one person is born a genius and another a boob;
one is born beautiful and another ugly; one is born
healthy and another crippled? The concept of rebirth
on earth, perhaps after an interval occupied by the
individual in distilling out of memories of a life just
ended such wisdom as his reflective powers enabled
him to extract, would enable us to believe there is
justice in the universe.
-C.J. Ducasse p247
How can I explain that on my first visit to London,
as an immigrant boy in passage to Canada, I knew (and
said so to my traveling companions with whom I was
strolling about) that around the next corner we would
see the Guild-hall and, in that obscure passage in
Threadneedle Street, we would find the church of the
Austin Friars in the English capital? Still, I had
never been to the city before, nor had I ever studied
its street plan.
-Pierre van Paassen p249
Other heights, in other lives, God willing. p133
It can be deduced from rigorous logic from the
most elementary assumption of a moral order in the
universe, and without that assumption there is not
even a universe: there is merely a monstrous futility
or a colossal nightmare.
-L. Stanley Jast p161
The Tissue of the Life to be
We weave with colors all our own,
And in the field of Destiny
We reap as we have sewn.
p252