"I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning." —Benjamin Franklin

Franklin wrote this epitaph at age 22 but was never used:

The Body of B. Franklin Printer,
Like the Cover of an Old Book,
Its Contents Torn Out
And Stripped of its Lettering and Gilding,
Lies Here Food for Worms,
But the Work shall not be Lost,
For it Will as He Believed
Appear Once More
In a New and more Elegant Edition
Revised and Corrected
By the Author

"I am in exact accord with the belief of Thomas Edison that spirit is immortal, that there is a continuing center of character in each personality. But I don’t know what spirit is, nor matter either. I suspect they are forms of the same thing. I never could see anything in this reputed antagonism between spirit and matter. To me this is the most beautiful, the most satisfactory from a scientific standpoint, the most logical theory of life. For thirty years I have leaned toward the theory of Reincarnation. It seems a most reasonable philosophy and explains many things. No, I have no desire to know what, or who I was once; or what, or who, I shall be in the ages to come. This belief in immortality makes present living the more attractive. It gives you all the time there is. You will always be able to finish what you start. There is no fever or strain in such an outlook. We are here in life for one purpose—to get experience. We are all getting it, and we shall all use it somewhere." —Henry Ford, New York American.

 

"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, Siddhartha

"I know I am deathless. No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. I laugh at what you call dissolution, and I know the amplitude of time." —Walt Whitman

"No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation - in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least." —Robert Graves

“I’m a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterises artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn’t come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works.” —Norman Mailer

 

"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, Stories from Behind the Stove

"So as through a glass and darkly, the age long strife I see, Where I fought in many guises, many names, but always me." —General George S. Patton

 

"Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe." —Albert Schweitzer

 

"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

 

"This life is only one of a series of lives which our incarnated part has lived. I have little doubt of our having pre-existed; and that also in the time of our pre-existence we were actively employed. So, therefore, I believe in our active employment in a future life, and I like the thought." —General Charles "Chinese" Gordon

 

"My life often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was an historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me." —Carl Jung

"Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes." —H.D. Thoreau

"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

 

"Learn thou! the Life is, spreading life through all; It cannot anywhere, by any means, Be anywise diminished, stayed, or changed. But for these fleeting frames which it informs with spirit deathless, endless, infinite, They perish. Let them perish, Prince! and fight! He who shall say, "Lo! I have slain a man!" He who shall think, "Lo! I am slain!" Those both know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain!" —Krishna - Bhagavad Gita (The Song Celestial: 2)

"Impenetrable, unentered, unassailed, unharmed, untouched, immortal, all-arriving, stable, sure, invisible, ineffable, by word and thought uncompassed, ever all itself, Thus is the Soul declared! How wilt thou, then,- Knowing it so,- grieve when thou shouldst not grieve? How, if thou hearest that the man new-dead is, like the man new-born, still living man- One same, existent Spirit- wilt thou weep? The end of birth is death; the end of death is birth: this is ordained! and mournest thou, Chief of the stalwart arm! for what befalls which could not otherwise befall… What is there sorrowful herein, dear Prince?" —Krishna - Bhagavad Gita (The Song Celestial: 2)

 

"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

 

"It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection." —Voltaire

 

"The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free." —Swami Vivekananda

 

"That which is part of our souls is eternal. . . Those lives are countless, but the soul or spirit that animates us throughout these myriads of existences is the same; and though "the book and volume" of the physical brain may forget events within the scope of one terrestrial life, the bulk of collective recollections can never desert the divine soul within us. Its whispers may be too soft, the sound of its words too far off the plane perceived by our physical senses; yet the shadow of events that were, just as much as the shadow of the events that are to come, is within its perceptive powers, and is ever present before its mind's eye." —Helena Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, Vol. II, p. 424

 

"It can be shown that an incorporeal and reasonable being has life in itself independently of the body... then it is beyond a doubt bodies are only of secondary importance and arise from time to time to meet the varying conditions of reasonable creatures. Those who require bodies are clothed with them, and contrariwise, when fallen souls have lifted themselves up to better things their bodies are once more annihilated. They are ever vanishing and ever reappearing." —Origen

"God generates beings, and sends them back over and over again, till they return to Him." —Koran

 

"All pure and holy spirits live on in heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit righteous bodies." —Jewish historian Josephus who lived around the time of Jesus

 

"And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" —The Disciples of Jesus, John 9:2 They were among the most knowledgeable men of Christian doctrine in history because they got it straight from the Master; and yet these learned men asked if the man was born blind because of a previous sin. Editor, Reverse Spins

"`But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.' Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist." —Jesus, (Matthew 17:12, 13)

"Souls are poured from one into another of different kinds of bodies of the world." —Jesus Christ in Gnostic Gospels: Pistis Sophia

"The counterfeit of the spirit is stationed without the soul, watching over it and dogging it, and the rulers bind it to the soul with their seal and with their bonds, and force it to commit mischiefs unremittingly, that it may be their slave forever, and be under their subjection forever in the transmigration into bodies: And they seal this counterfeit to the soul, so that it may be in every kind of sin and all the desires of the world. It is because of this that I have brought the mysteries into the world, which break all the bonds of the counterfeit of the spirit, which make the soul free and ransom it from the hands of its parents, the rulers, and transform it into pure light, to bring it into the kingdom of the True Father, the first everlasting mystery." ... Pistis Sophia