"Transmigration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is, living with it for a long time, until one has really obtained the right atmosphere, especially in the case of inanimate objects. This is where Hans Christian Andersen reigns supreme. Horace Scudder says of him: "By some transmigration, souls have passed into tin soldiers, balls, tops, money-pigs, coins, shoes and even such attenuated things as darning-needles, and when, informing these apparent dead and stupid bodies, they begin ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... of religious worship, and I am informed by Rev. Mr Harrison, missionary at Massett, and probably the best authority upon the subject, that there is no word in their language which signifies the praise or adoration of a Supreme Being. They believe in a Great Spirit, a future life, and in the transmigration of souls. Their God, (Sha-nung-et-lag-e-das), possesses chiefly the attributes of power, and is invoked to help them attain their desires. Their Devil, (Het-gwa-lan-a), corresponds with the devil of common ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... ancient nations the bean was regarded as a type of death, and the priests of Jupiter were forbidden to eat it, touch it, or even pronounce its name. The believer in the doctrine of transmigration of souls carefully avoided this article of food, in the fear of submitting beloved friends to ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... omnipotence of the Godhead, metempsychosis, or the doctrine and the transmigration of soul —not into the bodies of animals, as it obtained and still obtains in the East, but into those of other human beings—the eternal duration of existing substances, material and spiritual, consequently the immortality of the human soul, were the chief dogmas ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... remember a certain scene in the Caves of Kor yonder, when the living looked upon the dead, and dead and living were the same? And do you remember what Ayesha swore, that she would come again—yes, to this world; and how could that be except by re-birth, or, what is the same thing, by the transmigration ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... within these walls, the valor of WASHINGTON attracts the regard of CONDE; his modesty is applauded by TURENNE; his philosophy draws him to the bosom of CATINAT. A people who admit the ancient dogma of a transmigration of souls will often confess that the soul of Catinat dwells in ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... the same ungrateful and rebellious organ then that it is now. Nature was the same strict accountant then that she is now, and balanced her debit and credit columns with the same relentless accuracy. The "liver" of the last century has become, we are told, the "nerves" of to-day; which transmigration should be a bond of sympathy between the new woman and that unchangeable article, man. We have warmer spirits and a higher vitality than our home-keeping great-grandmothers ever had. We are seldom hysterical, and we never faint. If we are gay, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... doctrine is commonly known as metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls or reincarnation, the last name being the most correct. In detail the doctrine assumes various forms since different views are held about the relation of soul to body. But the essence of all is the same, namely that a life does not begin at birth or end at death but is ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... changes one's sky but not one's soul.], is an old observation; I passed this afternoon in confirming the truth of it among the English traders settled here: whose conversation, manners, ideas, and language, were so truly Londonish, so little changed by transmigration, that I thought some enchantment had suddenly operated, and carried me to drink tea in the ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... are impotent to reward the attention they catch. And thus men of such taste, or rather such want of taste, naturally fall in with the genius of sensationalism; which, whatever form it takes on, soon wears that form out, and has no way to sustain itself in life but by continual transmigration. Wherever it fixes, it has to keep straining higher and higher: under its rule, what was exciting yesterday is dull and insipid to-day; while the excess of to-day necessitates a further excess to-morrow; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... it was at home. He got the feeling that this business in which he was caught up was a business apart altogether from his own individual life,—a kind of trance in which his own life was held temporarily in abeyance, a kind of transmigration in which he occupied another and a very strange identity: from whose most strange personality, often so amazingly occupied, he looked wonderingly upon the identity that was his ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Had atomic transmigration attempted to draw the shells back into the Time sphere to which they really belonged? Sutter was a logical man, and even as this thought came his mind rejected it. It must be Travail. He had taken a sample shell from the basket and even now perhaps was dickering with ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... thou wert formed, heaven did a man begin; But the brute soul, by chance, was shuffled in. In woods and wilds thy monarchy maintain, Where valiant beasts, by force and rapine, reign. In life's next scene, if transmigration be, Some bear, or ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... you look, and, needless to add, how happy. If there is anything in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, my dear Stafford, your future embodiment will be that of a Newfoundland dog. Such an extremely strong passion for cold water is almost—er—indecent. I've had a lovely morning in the library; and your father is still at work with his correspondence. I asked ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... held to have within them a portion of the celestial nature. The soul, emanating from the celestial fire [245]—can combine with any form of matter, and is compelled to pass through various bodies. Adopting the Egyptian doctrine of transmigration, the Pythagoreans coupled it with the notion of future punishment ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... China by Corea. Its temples are more ornamented than the Shinto temples, and contain images of deities, bells, drums, holy books, and a great quantity of altar ornaments. The transmigration of souls, and rewards and punishments in a life after this, are doctrines of Buddhism. Outside the temples proper there are to be found in many places large or small images in stone or bronze of the deities ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... of Pythagoras respecting the transmigration of souls, a doctrine which made the eating of animal food little better than cannibalism or parricide. But, even if any of his followers rejected this view, Sotion would still maintain that the ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... In Buddha's belief (for as Buddha we shall now know him), human beings live many times and receive the reward or the punishment of past existences in those that follow. This belief is known as "the transmigration of souls." It is the foundation of the faith of Buddha which is believed in to-day by millions of persons in India and China, as well as ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... the just or the steps of the throne of God, but it is as if you were walking in the bazaars of Paradise—one of those Buddhist Paradises where the souls of the moderately pure find temporary rest from the whirl of transmigration, where the very lotus flowers are golden and the leaves of the trees are golden bells that tinkle in the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... finer cerebral organization throughout than a bird of prey, or any of the Picus family even. Does it signify nothing? I gaze into the eyes of the Gazelle,—eyes that will admit of no epithet or comparison,—and the old question of preexistence and transmigration rises afresh in my mind, and something like a dim recognition of kinship passes. I turn this Thrush in my hand,—I remember its strange ways, the curious look it gave me, its ineffable music, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... her innocent eyes demurely to his face. "You are so kind. I am deeply interested just now In the Japanese conception of the transmigration of souls." ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... Greeks—sought a solution of this august mystery in the doctrines of Transmigration and Anamnesis or Reminiscence. Nothing is whereto man is not kin. He knows all worlds and histories by virtue of having himself travelled the mystic spiral descent. Awaking through memory, the processes of his mind repeat the processes of the visible Kosmos. His unfolding is a hymn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... him further, but to satisfy myself that he lay in ignorance of the workings of his own mind, deliberately introduced him to Mortimer Collins's "Transmigration," and gave him a sketch of the plot before ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... or transmigration of souls—a doctrine to which the foregoing considerations are for the most part easy corollaries—crops up no matter in what direction we allow our thoughts to wander. And we meet instances of transmigration of body as well as of soul. I do not mean that both body and soul have transmigrated ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... Among the glowing embers red. A Fiery Furnace, to his mind, Hygiene and Luxury combined. He was, if I may put it so, A Saurian Abednigo. He loved to climb with nimble ease The branches of the Gas-log Trees Where oft on chilly winter nights He rose to dizzy Fahrenheits. Believers in Soul Transmigration See in him the Re-incarnation Of those Sad Plagues of summer, who Ask, "Is ...
— The Mythological Zoo • Oliver Herford
... the milky way—a notion, by the way, which Beausobre and others have traced in the remains of the Manicheans, and other Eastern philosophers. The Americans believe in the existence of souls distinct from bodies, and many of them in the transmigration of souls. According to Loskiel, they declare, 'that Indians cannot die eternally; for even Indian corn is vivified, and rises again.' The general opinion among them is, that the souls of the good alone go ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... Java; Malaiur; Cail; Coilum; Melibar; Tana; Cambaet; Kesmacoran; Socotra. —— of India with Hormuz, with Egypt by Aden; with Esher; with Dofar; with Calatu. Trades in Manzi, alleged to be hereditary. Tramontaine. Transmigration. Traps for fur animals. Travancore, Rajas of. Treasure of Maabar kings. Trebizond, Emperors of, and their tails. Trebuchets. Trees, of the Sun and Moon, superstitions about; by the highways; camphor; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... a complex elaboration takes time, since it involves a previous creation of powers, spirits or the shades of men; these lead to the belief in independent spirits of various origin, which people the heavens and all parts of the world. Hence arose the belief in transmigration, the necessary prelude to the theory of the incarnation, which was ultimately constituted by fetishism. The comparative study of languages shows that including the Aryan and Semitic races, the belief in spirits was developed in all peoples, and in all of them we also ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... The theory of transmigration of souls had taken strong hold. Mr. Fielding lost his scowl in a look of bewilderment, and the Bishop frankly shouted out ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my beanfield—effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say—and devour him, partly for experiment's sake; but tho it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that a good practise, however ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Ferguson. Lem got to reading books about soul transmigration or something of the kind, and turned to and let all his critters loose. Said that one living being didn't have any right to enslave another living being. Told them to go and be free. And somebody put his steers in the pound, and vealed two calves ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... 45. l. 13. In some former life committed. The soul, in its transmigration, expiates the sins committed in a former state of being. This necessary corollary from the doctrine of the metempsychosis appear to have prevailed among the pharisaic Jews in the time of our Saviour: "Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... well preserved ears of maize in tombs, which, judging from their construction, belong to a period anterior to the dynasty of the Incas; and these were fragments of two kinds of maize which do not now grow in Peru. If I believed in the transmigration and settlement of Asiatic races on the west coast of America, I should consider it highly probable that maize, cotton, and the banana, had been brought from Asia to the great west coast. But the supposed epoch of this alleged immigration must carry us back to the earliest ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... transmigration of souls as an explanation of human suffering. Cf. Origen in Ep. ad Rom., V: "I [Paul], he says, died [Rom. 7:9], for now sin began to be reckoned unto me. But Basilides, not noticing that these things ought to be understood of the natural law, according ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... to beliefs of this kind is the notion of plants as the habitation of the departing soul, founded on the old doctrine of transmigration. Hence, referring to bygone times, we are told by Empedocles that "there are two destinies for the souls of highest virtue —to pass either into trees or into the bodies of lions."[28] Amongst the numerous illustrations of this mythological ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... people ask politely How a friend I know so slightly Can be more to me than others I have liked a year or so; But they've never heard the history Of our transmigration's mystery, And they've no idea I loved ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... mummy is in existence? I should like to find it. I've an idea she left some hieroglyphic message for me on her mummy-case, and doesn't propose to let me rest easy until I find and translate it. Now, if I believed in transmigration of souls—do you see any mark of Antony about me? Say, though, just imagine the spirit of Marcus Antonius in a rubber apron, making an analysis of oleomargarine! But here we are; good-bye," and he left me without awaiting any reply. He seemed to me to be in decidedly better spirits than formerly, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... doctrines of Pythagoras were unfolded. This course of instruction, given, after the manner of the Egyptians, by means of images and symbols, began with geometrical science, in which Pythagoras during his stay in Egypt had become an adept, and led up finally to abstruse speculations concerning the transmigration of the soul and the nature of God, who was represented under the conception of a Universal Mind diffused through all things. It is, however, as the precursor of secret societies formed later in the West ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Meaning the "small vehicle, or conveyance." There are in Buddhism the triyana, or "three different means of salvation, i.e. of conveyance across the samsara, or sea of transmigration, to the shores of nirvana. Afterwards the term was used to designate the different phases of development through which the Buddhist dogma passed, known as the mahayana, hinayana, and madhyamayana." "The hinayana is the ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... Theft from the Sun, The, penalty for, They Don't Laugh, Things sacred to the Sun, Three Tribes, The Story of, Thunder, bird, described, brings the rain, steals women, Tobacco, Indians', songs, Tobacco thief punished, Tongues for Medicine Lodge, Touchwood Hills, Training of children, Transmigration of souls, Trapping wolves, Treachery, penalty for, Treatment of dead enemies, of women, Trial by jumping, Trivett, Rev. S., Tsin-ik-tsis'-tso-yiks, Ts[)i]-st[i]ks, T[)u]is-kis't[i]ks, Turtles, Two Medicine ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... been from the south of China, probably." He seemed to be talking to himself. "There's a considerable sprinkling of the belief down there, I've heard. It's an uncanny business—this transmigration of souls—" ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... bondage. Laying hold of that which was ready to his hand, if so be he might mould and purify it, Buddha was a liberator and reformer in respect to what had gone before. Let us take, for example, the doctrine of metempsychosis, or, as it is commonly called, the "transmigration of souls." No doubt, there is a great deal connected with this doctrine in the Buddhist books that cannot but appear to us puerile and shocking; but still, we do not well, we do not justly, if, as do so many, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... and recall faint memories of last year as though a century had lived and perished since then, seeing confusedly in their own lives the lives of others, and other existences in their own, until identity is almost gone in the endless transmigration of their souls from the shadow in one dream-tale to the wraith of themselves that dreams the next. So, in that hour, Unorna drifted through the changing scenes that a word had power to call up, scarce able, and wholly unwilling, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... modulation, inflexion, mood, qualification, innovation, metastasis, deviation, turn, evolution, revolution; diversion; break. transformation, transfiguration; metamorphosis; transmutation; deoxidization [Chem]; transubstantiation; [Genetics], mutagenesis transanimation^, transmigration, metempsychosis^; avatar; alterative. conversion &c (gradual change) 144; revolution &c (sudden or radical change) 146, inversion &c (reversal) 218; displacement &c 185; transference &c 270. changeableness &c 149; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... vulgaris.] a yojana thence is the end of the world. The perfected souls penetrate the sixth part of the uppermost kro['s]a of the (above-mentioned) yojana. There, at the top of the world reside the blessed perfected souls, rid of all transmigration, and arrived at the excellent state of perfection. The dimension of a perfected soul is two-thirds of the height which the individual had ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... souls of the righteous, or those who had lived what they called "the contemplative life," would be permitted to enter immediately after death. But, for the souls of sinners, they invented a system of expiatory punishments which, known as the Metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, taught that they would be compelled to successively animate the bodies of beasts, birds, fishes, etc., for a thousand years before being permitted to enter ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... divine, as hereafter shall follow; Which soul, fast and loose, sir, came first from Apollo, And was breath'd into Aethalides; Mercurius his son, Where it had the gift to remember all that ever was done. From thence it fled forth, and made quick transmigration To goldy-lock'd Euphorbus, who was killed in good fashion, At the siege of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta. Hermotimus was next (I find it in my charta) To whom it did pass, where no sooner it was missing ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... circumstance to my father, he informed me, to my astonishment and delight, that if the head of the mongrel Fiddle had been placed on the Stradivari, date 1710, from the Goding collection, it was now, as the effect of recent transmigration, on ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... this time one may observe closer co-operation between Confucianism and Buddhism; not only with meditative Buddhism (Dhyana) as at the beginning of the T'ang epoch and earlier, but with the main branch of Buddhism, monastery Buddhism (Vinaya). From now onward the Buddhist doctrines of transmigration and retribution, which had been really directed against the gentry and in favour of the common people, were turned into an instrument serving the gentry: everyone who was unfortunate in this life must show such amenability to the government ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... present century. After the introduction and triumph of Christianity in Britain, for several centuries the two systems of thought and ritual mutually influenced each other, corrupting and corrupted.4 A striking example in point is this. The notion of a punitive and remedial transmigration belonged to Druidism. Now, Taliesin, a famous Welsh bard of the sixth century, locates this purifying metempsychosis in the Hell of Christianity, whence the soul gradually rises again to felicity, the way for it having been opened by Christ! Cautiously eliminating ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... all the Japonians, excepting some few who make profession of atheism, and believe the soul mortal, are idolaters, and hold the transmigration of souls, after the doctrine of Pythagoras. Some of them pay divine worship to the sun and moon; others to the Camis, those ancient kings of whom we have made mention; and to the Potoques, the gods of China. There are divers of them who adore some kinds of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... The technical term for this transmigration, used by Pythagoreans and others, is [Greek: metangismos], the pouring of water from one vessel ([Greek: angos]) ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... by itself demonstrates that the confused belief in all things being on one level has thus introduced vegetables into the dominion of myth. As far as possessing souls is concerned, Mr. Tylor has proved that plants are as well equipped as men or beasts or minerals.(1) In India the doctrine of transmigration widely and clearly recognises the idea of trees or smaller plants being animated by human souls. In the well-known ancient Egyptian story of "The Two Brothers,"(2) the life of the younger is practically merged in that of the acacia tree where he has hidden his ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... therefore he could not have been a prophet sent by God. Akbar disbelieved the story of his night-journey to heaven. Meantime Akbar was eagerly learning the mysteries of other religions. He entertained Brahmans, Sufis, Parsis, and Christian fathers. He believed in the transmigration of the soul, in the supreme spirit, in the ecstatic reunion of the soul with God, in the deity of fire and the sun. He leaned toward Christianity; he rejected ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Chepewyans) have some faint notion of transmigration of the soul; so that if a child be born with teeth, they instantly imagine, from its premature appearance, that it bears a resemblance to some person who had lived to an advanced age, and that he has assumed a renovated life, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... spirit, Psyche. Associated Words: psychology, psychic, psychological, psychomachy, transmigration, metempsychosis, psychogenesis, psychopannychism, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... mistake our dogmas, Sir John. We do not believe in transmigration in the individual at all, but in the transmigration of classes. Thus, we hold that whenever a given generation of men, in a peculiar state of society, attain, in the aggregate, a certain degree of moral improvement, or mentality, as ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... who reads Schubert's History of the Soul, and lives, for the most part, in the clouds of the Middle Ages. To him the spirit-world is still open. He believes in the transmigration of souls; and I dare say is now followingthe spirit of some departed friend, who has taken ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which he probably derived from the Egyptians; and he professed to preserve a distinct remembrance of several states of existence through which his soul had passed. It is related of him that on one occasion, seeing a dog beaten, he interceded ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... regarding another doctrine, fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us—the doctrine namely of metempsychosis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... holding his "baba's" robe very tight lest he should slide off over the donkey's tail. I looked around for Bergh or some member of a humane society, but no one except ourselves seemed to see anything unusual. I thought if I were a Hindu and believed in the transmigration of souls, I would pray that, whatever shape my spirit took when it left its present form, it might not enter that of a much-abused ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... of transmigration will hardly fail, after they have read this story, to think that the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Cohen—who had made his "barrel" in ready-made clothing, felt in no position to contradict him when he stated his belief in the theory of transmigration as expounded by Pythagoras, and expressed the opinion that by chance the soul of Cleopatra might be occupying the graceful body of the club cat. Abe was not acquainted with the doctrine of Pythagoras, though he had ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... If the transmigration of a soul takes place into a rational being, it simply becomes the soul of that body. But if the soul migrates into a brute beast, it follows the body outside, as a guardian spirit follows a man. For there could never be a rational soul ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... so complex and so dominant, that the animal is too merely an animal to him. To Indians the idea of the transmigration of the soul from animal to man, and man to animal, does not seem strange, and so from our scriptures pity for all sentient creatures has not been banished as a ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues that I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her hayre vp like the Summer Corne, or as a blazing starre whose streames rise vpward & being changd, fell leaues, that vp were borne, by the rude windes, yet had you but haue heard You'd sware, a sigh for Mirrha's transmigration Had beene decreed by all the windie nation. and euerie Autume, since a thing moste rare, The falling leaues, resemble ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... our few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls,—a good way to continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural successions they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of beings, and, enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make accumulation ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... prolonged for a season and time," (v. 12.) That is, though their distinct and successive dominions were severally swept from the earth, yet their lives,—the diabolical principles by which they had been actuated survived; and these passed, by a kind of transmigration, into the body of the fourth beast. This transition of animating principles or imperial policy of inveterate hostility to the kingdom of God, we think, is plainly indicated by the three features of this beast of the sea, the "leopard, bear and lion." If these three "slew ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... sleep of death they dedicated their sepulchral monuments—AEternali somno![136] If the full light of revelation had not yet broken on them, it can hardly be denied that they had some glimpses and a dawn of the life to come, from the many allegorical inventions which describe the transmigration of the soul. A butterfly on the extremity of an extinguished lamp, held up by the messenger of the gods intently gazing above, implied a dedication of that soul; Love, with a melancholy air, his legs crossed, leaning on an inverted torch, the flame thus naturally extinguishing itself, elegantly ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... thrice repeated laugh, also, could retain its vitality only in an atmosphere pervaded by a belief in the transmigration of souls. Buddhistic apologues have sometimes passed into legends of Christian Saints. But it would be difficult to perform the operation in the case of an account of how a woman, who had tormented to death her husband's sister, was justly punished by ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... time the process of combustion is going on; and 'I' have no more permanence than the flame. 'I' only appear to be there as long as the process of life goes on. And as the flame only continues so long as there is something for it to feed on, so the process of transmigration or re-birth continues only so long as the thirst for being continues: the escape from re-birth is conditional on the extinction of that thirst or desire; and the disciple who has succeeded in putting off lust and desire has attained to deliverance from death and ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... continually. Cremation, with the Hindu, takes the place of burial. The ashes are collected and are preserved in a tomb. To die in Benares, and to have a temple for a tomb, is the surest passport to happiness in a future state, since the transmigration of souls into higher or lower forms is an essential ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... "final redemption into that wondrous realm from which we wander farthest when we try to take it by force." For this realm he chooses death and night as symbols, but what he means to imply is the nirvana of Buddhistic philosophy, the final deliverance of the soul from transmigration. Such love as that of Tristan and Isolde presented itself to Wagner as ceaseless struggle and endless contradiction, and for this problem nirvana alone offers a happy outcome; it means ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Egypt that Pythagoras owed his favourite doctrine of the Metempsychosis or transmigration of souls.(340) The Egyptians believed, that at the death of men their souls transmigrated into other human bodies; and that, if they had been vicious, they were imprisoned in the bodies of unclean or ill-conditioned ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... Postexistence, if I may so call it; and that as Simonides describes Brutes entering into the Composition of Women, others have represented human Souls as entering into Brutes. This is commonly termed the Doctrine of Transmigration, which supposes that human Souls, upon their leaving the Body, become the Souls of such Kinds of Brutes as they most resemble in their Manners; or to give an Account of it as Mr. Dryden has described ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... without complete identity is not to me desirable. That our beloved ones no longer have the warm personal interest in us which they felt in life—that they are perhaps merged in the perfection of God, or undergoing transmigration out of one form of intelligence to another, without any recollection of what happened in a former state, is not consoling to the yearning human heart that never can forget, and with all the sufferings ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... bards of many an age, whose names have perished with the races that produced them, have thought and sung of soul-incarnation, metempsychosis, transmigration, and kindred concepts, in a thousand different ways. In their strangely poetical language, the Tupi Indians, of Brazil, term a child pitanga, "suck soul," from piter, "to suck," anga, "soul." The Seminole ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... an unconsciousness of any suffering he might inflict that left mere cruelty far behind. If I were making an automaton king, I would model my machine on the lines of Hammerfeldt. He had no belief in a future life, but would sometimes trifle whimsically with the theory of a transmigration of souls; he traced all beliefs in immortality to the longing of those who were unfortunate here (and who did not think himself so?) for a recompense (a revenge he called it) hereafter, and declared transmigration ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... up a quotation for Felix in Southey's Doctor, lit on his quaint theory of the human soul having previously migrated through successive stages of vegetable and animal life, and still retaining something characteristic from each transmigration. Her brothers were a good deal tickled with the idea; and Lance exclaimed, 'I know who must have been rhubarb, queen-wasp, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... doctrine of the Correlation and Homogenity of all Forces clearly proves that they are not many, but one—"a dynamic self-identity masked by transmigration."—Martineau's "Essays," ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... appear among us every Day in the critical Juncture of their Transmigration, just when they have so much of the Man left as to be known by their Names, and enough of the Devil taken up to settle their Characters? This Easiness of the Devil's access to these People, and the great Convenience it is to him in his general Business, is a Proof to me that ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... glorious transmigration From this to so divine an edifice Hast thou straight made! heere from a winged stone Transform'd into a bird ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... of their past conduct while in the body.* It did not attempt to teach the higher doctrine of successive rebirths,—which the people could not possibly have understood,—but the merely symbolic doctrine of transmigration, which everybody could understand. To die was not to melt back into nature, but to be reincarnated; and the character of the new body, as well as the conditions of the new existence, would depend upon the quality of one's deeds and thoughts in the present body. All states and conditions of being ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... Passion brings to those, whose Hearts are capable of receiving its soft Impressions; for 'tis not every one that can be sensible of its tender Touches. How many Examples, from History and Observation, could I give of its wondrous Power; nay, even to a Degree of Transmigration! How many Idiots has it made wise! How many Fools eloquent! How many home-bred Squires accomplish'd! How many Cowards brave! And there is no sort of Species of Mankind on whom it cannot work some Change and Miracle, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... put upon these objective facts. For example, with respect to the Gadarene miracle, it is one question whether, at a certain time and place, a raving madman became sane, and a herd of swine rushed into the lake of Tiberias; and quite another, whether the cause of these occurrences was the transmigration of certain devils from the man into the pigs. And again, it is one question whether Jesus made a long oration on a certain occasion, mentioned in the first Gospel; altogether another, whether more or fewer of the propositions contained in the "Sermon on the Mount" were uttered on that occasion. ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... of Elysium there flowed a gentle, silent stream, called Lethe (oblivion), whose waters had the effect of dispelling care, and producing utter forgetfulness of former events. According to the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls, it was supposed that after the shades had inhabited Elysium for a thousand years they were destined to animate other bodies on {134} earth, and before leaving Elysium they drank of the river Lethe, in order that they might enter upon their new career ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... might be said; in keeping with which is the following: 'It is good to keep close the secret of a king,' Tobit xii. 7, in order that the doctrine of the entrance of souls into bodies (not, however, that of the transmigration from one body into another) may not be thrown before the common understanding, nor what is holy given to the dogs, nor pearls be cast before swine. For such a procedure would be impious, being equivalent to a betrayal of the mysterious declarations of God's wisdom.... It is sufficient, ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... who divined his thoughts; 'you will transform yourself back again. There will be no transmigration of soul for you, if you are lost by your own sorcery. Let dogs delight to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Many Indians believe in the transmigration of souls, and some of them profess to remember previous states ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... theatre it may be that Paul Hayne heard Jenny Lind fill the night with a melody which would irradiate his soul throughout life and reproduce itself in the music-tones of his gently cadenced verse. There the ill-fated Adrienne Lecouvreur lived and died again in her wondrous transmigration into the soul of ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... the visible and corporeal. There is the same distinction between knowledge and opinion which occurs in the Theaetetus and Republic, the same enmity to the poets, the same combination of music and gymnastics. The doctrine of transmigration is still held by him, as in the Phaedrus and Republic; and the soul has a view of the heavens in a prior state of being. The ideas also remain, but they have become types in nature, forms of men, animals, birds, fishes. And the attribution of evil to physical causes accords ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... in the air just above the place where the towers of Warwick Castle marked the horizon; and seemed as if fluttering with delight at his own melody. "Surely," thought I, "if there were such a thing as transmigration of souls, this might be taken for some poet, let loose from earth, but still revelling in song, and carolling about ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... memory? I think it would. The sentiment which would dictate it to me is too abstruse; and besides, I think my wife is the proper person to receive the dedication of my life's work. At the same time, it is very odd—it really looks like the transmigration of souls—I feel that I must do something for Fergusson; Burns has been before me with the gravestone. It occurs to me you might take a walk down the Canongate and see in what condition the stone is. If it be at all uncared ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
