"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

"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

"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 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

"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

"As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence."
- Henry David Thoreau

"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

"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

"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

" 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 Jewish Kabbalistic texts

"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, student of Copernicus, 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

"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)

"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