“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 — Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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 — The Star Rover

“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 — Stories from Behind the Stove

“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 — Siddhartha

“‘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 through 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

“As we live through thousands of dreams in our 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 the life of God.”
—Count Leo Tolstoy