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Reincarnation   /riɪnkɑrnˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Reincarnation

noun
1.
Embodiment in a new form (especially the reappearance or a person in another form).
2.
A second or new birth.  Synonyms: rebirth, renascence.
3.
The Hindu or Buddhist doctrine that a person may be reborn successively into one of five classes of living beings (god or human or animal or hungry ghost or denizen of Hell) depending on the person's own actions.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Reincarnation" Quotes from Famous Books



... Thus we come upon a bygone physical planetary condition, which was afterwards spiritualized, and subsequently transformed into our earth by repeated materialization. Our earth is therefore presented to us as the reincarnation of a very ancient planet. But occult science can go back still farther; and it then finds the whole process twice repeated. Thus, our earth has passed through three previous planetary conditions separated by intermediate spiritual conditions of rest. The physical substance, however, ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... I was a fairly average person—I mean that I was possessed of an average share of the humanities. I have only my memory to go by. I am one of those fortunate persons, you see, who have realized an actual reincarnation. I have the advantage of having looked out upon life from two different sets of windows.—By the bye, Aynesworth, have you noticed that unwholesome-looking youth ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... that Capel street library book renewed or they'll write to Kearney, my guarantor. Reincarnation: ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... the Holy, "The Beautiful Sun of Kief," in the tenth century, Russia has had the tradition of international peace. Vladimir wandered over the country, sword and battle ax in hand, like a reincarnation of Thor, armed with his mighty and wondrous hammer. Then came his yearning for a new religion—something to inspire his life better than Perun—Russia's old god of thunder—and the other idols, and a little later, the picturesque ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... in an intense longing and desire to attain that liberation which brought him consciousness of godhood—deliverance from the sense of sin and sorrow that had oppressed him; immunity from the necessity for reincarnation. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... central fancy of reincarnation affected me deeply. But I modified the idea as displayed by Blavatsky and Theosophists generally. From a long familiarity with the stars, in conjunction with the inevitable creative and anthropomorphic sensibility of youth, I began to think that this ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... The theory of reincarnation and that alone, can furnish a full explanation of FitzGerald's splendid success as ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... scientific observer; but Nicolai, of a sudden, becomes from time to time a seer, an idealist, a prophet, like the religious heroes of old. With all his equipment of modern science, he is a strange instance of reincarnation. The Old Germany of Goethe, Herder, and Kant, speaks to us through his voice. To use his own words, he claims his rights as against the right of Ludendorff and other usurpers to adopt the political methods ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... so much pleasure in telling her tale that Wynnette, in her pungent way, said that the lady from the Wild Cats' Gulch was a reincarnation of the spirit of the Ancient Mariner, with the variation that to her every new acquaintance was a "wedding guest," to whom she was bound to tell her story. And that for all the sufferings the injured wife had endured she found full compensation in the narration of her great ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... allegiance to the successive Messiahs who reincarnated him, even as he had reincarnated King David. For the new Sabbatian doctrine of the Godhead, according to which the central figure of its Trinity found successive reincarnation in a divine man, had left the door open for a series of prophets who sprang up, now in Tripoli, now in Turkey, now in Hungary. I must do my grandfather the justice to say that his motives were purer than those of many of the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... that Jesus could have meant that John was the same individual as Elijah; nor could the people have so understood His words, since the false doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of spirits was repudiated by the Jews.[790] The seeming difficulty is removed when we consider that, as the name appears in the New Testament, "Elias" is used for "Elijah,"[791] with no attempt at distinction between Elijah the Tishbite, and any other person ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... ceremonies the appropriate skins were worn by those who were impersonating particular gods or goddesses. The wearing of these skins of divine animals seems to have been prompted not so much by the idea of a reincarnation in animal form as by the desire for identification and communion with the particular deity which the animal represented. The whole question, however, is one of great complexity, which can only be settled by a critical study of the texts by some ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... crape upon her soul, as usual. During these attacks the Snow household walked on tiptoe, as if the housekeeper were an invalid in reality. Even consoling speeches from Albert, who with Laban when the latter was sober, enjoyed in her mind the distinction of being the reincarnation of "Robert Penfold," brought no relief to the suffering Rachel. Nothing but the news brought by the milkman, that "Labe was taperin' off," and would probably return to his desk in a ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... do but to return with the men and watch his wife keenly. Strange to say, there was a certain stimulus in this which stirred his monotonous pulses and was not without a vague pleasure. There is a revelation to some natures in newly awakened jealousy that is a reincarnation ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte

... Taoists like to assert that Laotsze's journey to the West was undertaken before the birth of Buddha, who, according to many, is only a reincarnation of Laotsze. The guardian of the Han-Gu pass is mentioned by the name of Guan Yin Hi, in the Lia ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various

... keeping a fellow at arm's length when you want to," he went on, ruefully, "in spite of the magic call of your whole tempting personality. You know 'Die Walkuere,' don't you?—but of course you do. If I believed in the theory of reincarnation, I should feel sure that you were Bruenhilde herself, surrounded by ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous

... your own admission, at best 'you' are a false personality forcibly impressed on a helpless mind that never had a ghost of a chance. In effect, you are a parasite living on a host, the reincarnation of an ego that ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... a very modern and material reincarnation," he remarked, as he rose. "If I am not mistaken, the apparition wore shoes, shoes with nails in the heels, and nails that are not like those in American shoes. I shall have to compare the marks I have found with marks I have copied from shoe-nails in the wonderful collection ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... into some bondage of eternity for the security of a night's lodging, and then wonder that life grows sour upon our palate. [she smiles over at CHARLES'S bewilderment] Which means, in the literal terms of those who credit reincarnation, that if we married, those things you would have to do to keep your heart up would cause your next showing to degenerate into a slight motion of slime at the base of mountains. Think of the distance lost, Charles, for such a little mincing forward step. Come, the morning wanes. Fortunately ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange

... acceptance of the whole. Moreover when the idea was phrased it was distinctly as a revival, not as a novelty. The previous existence of a kingdom of Burgundy was undoubtedly a potent factor in the degree of progress made by Charles towards conjuring into new life a reincarnation of that ancient realm. Yet it was a factor clothed with a shadow rather than with the substance of truth. Geographically there was very little in common between the dominion projected more or less definitely in 1473 and any one of the kingdoms ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... can neither die nor rest. They who have vainly loved only seem to die; they really live on in generations of hearts, that their desire may be fulfilled. They wait, perhaps though centuries, for the reincarnation of shapes beloved,—forever weaving into the dreams of youth their vapory composite of memories. Hence the ideals unattainable,—the haunting of troubled souls by ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... of Kalidasa's writing is his love of external nature. No doubt it is easier for a Hindu, with his almost instinctive belief in reincarnation, to feel that all life, from plant to god, is truly one; yet none, even among the Hindus, has expressed this feeling with such convincing beauty as has Kalidasa. It is hardly true to say that he personifies rivers and mountains and trees; to him they have ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa

... retired to her state-room, conscious that her balance needed readjusting. She had heard and read much lore concerning reincarnation, skeptically; yet here, within call of her voice, was Arthur, not the shadow of a substance, but Arthur, shorn of his elegance, his soft lazy voice, his half-dreaming eyes, his charming indolence. Why should this man's path cross hers, out of all ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath

... true that you can't, the whole fabric of the wonderful story, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful I have ever read, "The Moon Maid," by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is built on a fallacy. You see, I am a believer in reincarnation and I would surely like to correspond with others who are also! Would not that also disprove the whole theory of reincarnation if it is true? I think it is not true, but I may be wrong. Is reincarnation ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... to Dickens' nurse requiring her bones, which were under a glass-case, to be "interred with every undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound ten, in another particular place."[12] Melmoth the Wanderer, when he becomes the wooer of Immalee, seems almost like a reincarnation of the Demon Lover. The wandering ball of fire that illuminates the dusky recesses of so many Gothic abbeys is but another manifestation of the Fate-Moon, which shines, foreboding death, after Thorgunna's funeral, in the Icelandic saga. The witchcraft and ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... impossible. His soul manages him as a strong nature manages a weak one, and his soul is a female, not a male. For souls have sexes, otherwise what would be the sense of talking about wedded souls? I have no doubt whatever of the truth of reincarnation on earth. Souls go on and on following ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens

... about Count Caloveglia. His pedigree, uncontaminated by Moor or Spaniard, went back to hoariest antiquity. Many people said he was a reincarnation of old Hellas. Elbowing his way through crowded cities or chatting with sunburnt peasant-lads among the vineyards, he received thrills of pleasurable inspiration—thrills to which grosser natures are inaccessible. He loved to watch the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... young, but Lanyard had his cab to dispose of and not a few other essential details to arrange before he could take definite steps toward the reincarnation of ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... presiding genius of my culinary department, as she could not give us the bounteous feast she knew was expected on such occasions. I, as usual, when there was any lack in the viands, tried to be as brilliant as possible in conversation; discussing Nirvana, Karma, reincarnation, and thus turning attention from the evanescent things of earth to the joys of a life to come,—not an easy feat to perform with strong-minded women,—but, in parting, they seemed happy and refreshed, and all promised ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... social virtue is as easily swayed by personal predilection as was that of Marie-Joseph. To me the persistence of the same cruel and stupid customs throughout the centuries is a source of perplexed pessimism. I cannot brush aside the problem by a facile reference to reincarnation. If John the brigand was a cut-throat and a robber in his twentieth appearance on this planet, why should he persist in these idiosyncrasies in his twenty-third return as George the politician and successful captain ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... moving, natural thing in a desolation to which generations and centuries of forebears had given it birthright. But Melisse was like her mother. In the dreams of the two who were planning out her fate, she was to be a reincarnation of her mother. That dream left a ray of comfort in Cummins' breast when his wife died. It stirred happy visions within Jan. And it ended with a serious shock when Maballa brought into their mental perspective of things the possibilities ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... the mysterious Egyptian expression which had at times suggested the reincarnation of some ancient spirit Barbara maintained the stillness which had come upon her on the previous day. "That must be very satisfactory ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... the forms in which the daimon is manifested. The daimon cannot be shut up within one personality, he has power to animate many. He is able to transform himself from one personality into another. The great thought of reincarnation springs as a matter of course from the Heraclitean premises, and not only the thought but the experience of the fact. The thought only paves the way for the experience. One who becomes conscious of the daimonic element within him does not recognise it as innocent and ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner

... a considerable revolution in Lysander Grove, which during several weeks rang with Parisian argot and Parisian fun. Many of these Frenchmen were a queer lot. They seemed the very reincarnation of Murger's Bohemians, and evidently took all the discomforts and privations of their situation as a first-class joke. Kosinksi detested them most cordially, though, spite of himself, he was a tremendous favourite in their ranks, and ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith

... of philosophies. In Realidad and Mariucha is found the most explicit setting forth of that theory of life which enables an oppressed spirit to rise above its conditioning circumstances.[9] At times Galds appeared to dally with Buddhism: at least some critics have so explained the reincarnation of doa Juana in Casandra, novela. Another tenet of Buddhism, or, as some would have it, of Krausism, was often in Galds' thought, and is emphasized particularly in Los condenados and Brbara. Every sin of man must be at some time expiated; and not alone ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... was a Fitzgerald, or Fitzgerald was a reincarnation of Omar. It was not to the disadvantage of the latter poet that he followed so closely in the footsteps of the earlier. A man of extraordinary genius had appeared in the world, had sung a song of incomparable beauty ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... Reincarnation is prompt and practical, and unaccompanied by wasteful and delusive hope. Herein lies the explanation of many a deliberate and confessed killing, while to the meteor have the perpetrators looked for absolution and remission of their sin. That ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... would sit, and the old man's face would lose its drawn look, and light up, as her clear young soprano pealed out over the din, urging this player to shoot, that to kick some opponent in the face; or describing the referee in no uncertain terms as a reincarnation of the late ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... If the present moment can again intersect the stream of past conscious experience, it may equally do so with regard to the future. This brings up the tremendous questions of free-will and fore-ordination. Upon these the Oriental doctrines of karma and reincarnation cast the only light by which the reason consents to be guided. As these doctrines are intimately related both to higher time and to trance revelations, some consideration of karma and reincarnation ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... and so all the while they are in a condition of unrest; and most serious of all for many is the fear of death. For the Theosophist the whole of this feeling is entirely swept away. He realizes the great truth of reincarnation. He knows that he has often before laid aside physical bodies, and so he sees that death is no more than sleep—that just as sleep comes in between our days of work and gives us rest and refreshment, so between these days of labour ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater

... often the things used by the body during life, by the action of fire. On the other hand, those who buried their dead believed that the spirit of the dead man dwelt in some fashion in the tomb, or at least hovered around the body, waiting, perhaps, for a reincarnation, and capable of using the weapons, the utensils, and the foods of its former life. Therefore the body was carefully interred, sometimes even embalmed, and its weapons and foods, or at all events simulacra of these, ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... while the wind continued to shriek down the valley, driving the chill rain before it. Each time the suspicions of the watcher passed and Henry moved slowly on, infinite patience allied with infinite skill. If there was anything in heredity and reincarnation he was the greatest tracker and hunter in that old primeval world, where such skill ranked first among human qualities. As always with him, his will and courage rose with the danger. Crouched in the bush fifteen feet away he looked at the warrior, a powerful ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... many faces and figures which an artist might easily assimilate to an athletic example of the traditional John Bull. Redmond himself, hawk-faced and thick-bodied, might have been taken for no bad reincarnation of Raymond Le Gros. To this extent he was less of a Celt than many of his countrymen; but he was assuredly none the less Irish because he was a Wexfordman. The county of his birth was the county which had made the greatest resistance ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... right understanding of the subject of rebirth, or reincarnation, it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that the soul, or center of individualized consciousness, is the man and that the physical body is merely an instrument he uses for a number of years; that the causal body is his permanent body for the whole of human evolution; that the mental plane is his ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... Browning] an almost exact reincarnation of the daughters of Lear in Miss Landor. She was perfectly hard and perfectly cold. She told me of her father's troublesome ways, nay, misdeeds, of how she had borne them for a long time, of how he had promised better behaviour, and of how he had broken his word again and again. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... is too late to change. "We have gone too far, raised passions we cannot allay." I shall not try further to confute the honest pessimist. The preceding chapters have been written in vain if they do not shatter the theory of original sin. And to the cynical pessimist, who is a reincarnation of our old friend Fitzgibbon (for that clear-headed statesman frankly imputed original sin to the conquerors of Ireland, as well as to the conquered), I would only say: "Use your common sense." These panics over the vagaries and excesses of an Irish Parliament, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... In the valley to the right, the atmosphere of the Sicilian Idylls is preserved by two half-clad goatherds who have brought their flock to pasture from hillside Mediunah, in whose pens they are kept safe from thieves at night. As though he were a reincarnation of Daphnis or Menalcas, one of the brown-skinned boys leans over a little promontory and plays a tuneless ghaitah, while his companion, a younger lad, gives his eyes to the flock and his ears to the music. The last rains of this favoured land's brief winter have ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan

... reawakening of the old shipyards, their slips all filled with the frames of wooden vessels for the foreign trade, is like a revival of the old merchant marine, a reincarnation of ghostly memories. In mellowed dignity the square white houses beneath the New England elms recall to mind the mariners who dwell therein. It seems as if their shipyards also belonged to the past; but the summer visitor finds a fresh attraction in ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various



Words linked to "Reincarnation" :   renascence, nascence, cycle of rebirth, reincarnate, nativity, nascency, birth, embodiment, incarnation, avatar, theological doctrine, transmigration



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