"Metempsychosis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... being advertised of his or her surprising talents: and to pass by all intermediate sizes, here and there standing by himself, in all the prickly pride of an immortal aloe, some one big pot monopolizes all the cast of earth, domineering over the conservatory as Brutus's colossal Caesar, or his metempsychosis in a Wellington. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 417, the Index Geographicus of Schultens and Tavernier, Voyages, p. i. p. 308, 309. The Ayoubites descended from the tribe of the Rawadiaei, one of the noblest; but as they were infected with the heresy of the Metempsychosis, the orthodox sultans insinuated that their descent was only on the mother's side, and that their ancestor was a stranger who settled among ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... strange way to be dominated by the shade of Cleopatra. Now, if I believed in metempsychosis, I should think you were Mark Antony brought down to date. There, with that present sober air of yours, you'd pass anywhere for such an anachronism. But to be serious, and to give you advice which is positively bilious with gravity, I should say, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... This is an allusion to the doctrine of metempsychosis taught by the ancient philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, according to which when a man died his soul remained in the shades below suffering any punishment which the man had deserved, till after a certain lapse of time all the taint of the former existence had been ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... frequent intercourse with him. He was the favourite animal of superstition, and a few tales of him are still current. These, however, are not of much interest or variety, the leading ideas in them being these: That the great seal is a human soul, or a fallen angel in metempsychosis, and that to him who is remarkable for hostility to the phocal race some fatal retribution will ensue. I can easily conceive the feeling of awe with which a fisherman would be impressed when, in the sombre magnificence ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... discourse is aborigines, their dispositions, animadversions, and propensities," explained the constable. "According to the latest scientific hypotheses, the metempsychosis—" ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... conduct. He pawed, he hawed, he kicked, all the while glancing at the sons of Jerusalem, and braying louder and more discordant every moment. I could not understand the mule's idiosyncrasies. Possibly, I thought, the doctrine of the metempsychosis may be true, and this brute, in the early stages of its development, once have been in love. He has a fit on him now, I fancied—he is once more possessed of a petticoat. Why not? If love converts men into asses, why should not asses, in their maddest ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... Melzi, the refinements of a miniaturist; Beltraffio, hard brilliancy of light and colour; Cesare da Sesto, somewhat of effeminate sweetness; and thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend themselves again in what is Lionardo's own. It is surely not without significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover of all things double-natured ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... combined with the brute, as in the winged bulls of Nineveh and the sphinxes of Egypt. Man is regarded simply as a part of nature, he does not rise above the plane of animal life. The soul has its immortality only in an eternal metempsychosis—a cycle of life which sweeps through all the brute creation. But in Grecian sculpture we have less of nature, more of man; less of massiveness, more of grace and elegance; less repose, and more of action. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... views he had acquired. As he had once alluded to Dante's luck in finding a subject like the pilgrimage through hell and purgatory into paradise, it occurred to me to suggest, for the desired frame, the Brahman myth of Metempsychosis, which in Plato's version comes within reach of our classical education. He did not think it a bad idea, and I accordingly took some trouble to define the form such a poem would take. He was to decide upon three acts, each containing three songs, which would make nine songs ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at last [263] be sav'd! No end is limited to damned souls. Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? Or why is this immortal that thou hast? O, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true, This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd Into some brutish beast! all beasts are happy, For, when they die, Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements; But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell. Curs'd ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... metempsychosis," interrupted Sonia, with a reminiscence of her early lessons. "The Egyptians believed that our souls had once inhabited the bodies of animals, and would return to animals again after ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... he died of old, how great a strife Had been who from his death should draw their life! Who should, by one rich draught, become whate'er Seneca, Cato, Numa, Caesar, were, Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this An universal metempsychosis! Must all these aged sires in one funeral Expire? all die in ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... undoubtedly offer pious homage, they do not style "God" but on the contrary maintain that, though an emanation from a "sublimated ethereal being," he is by no means a deity. According to their philosophy of metempsychosis, however, each successive Buddha, in passing through a series of transmigrations, must necessarily have occupied in turn the forms of white animals of a certain class,—particularly the swan, the stork, the white sparrow, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... as to my indebtedness. I have also found Dr. Oldenberg's Buddha (Ed. 2, 1890) very helpful. The origin of the theory of transmigration stated in the above extract is an unsolved problem. That it differs widely from the Egyptian metempsychosis is clear. In fact, since men usually people the other world with phantoms of this, the Egyptian doctrine would seem to presuppose the Indian as a ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... sickness. He thinks that his spirit is immortal, and that it will be rewarded hereafter in heaven or punished in hell, both of which places are beneath the earth, hell being the land of volcanoes; but he has no theory as to a resurrection of the body or metempsychosis. He preserves a tradition about a flood which seems to be the counterpart of the Biblical deluge, and about an earthquake which lasted a hundred days, produced the three volcanoes of Yezo and created the island by bridging the waters ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... song, he must vitalize the world, must make it live, breathe and feel, must find books in the running brooks, and sermons in stones, or brooks and stones are to him as if they had not been. In the "Metempsychosis of the Pine," this characteristic is finely displayed. The poet imagines himself to have been a pine, and retraces his experiences while in that state of being. The pine becomes a conscious creature, revelling in the joys of its own existence, feeling the sap stir in its veins, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... came, as to a new world, so completely had I been separated from it during the two last years. It was as if one of the spirits in the metempsychosis imagined by Fourier, had returned to the brilliant sphere from which death had driven him in temporary exile. I was at first enchanted, intoxicated. The mental activity which had seemed so intense in the sluggish province, needed to be quickened fourfold to keep abreast ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... the doctrine of Pythagoras was that known by the name of the Metempsychosis,—that the soul after death rested a certain time till it was purified, and had acquired a forgetfulness of what had previously happened to it; and then reanimated some other body. The ethics of the Pythagoreans consisted more in ascetic practice and maxims for the restraint of the ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... to the dangers of the climb, but also to a mysterious menace of tupapaus, or ghosts. I had seen a canoe with the head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration. The chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake Vaihiria had been the progenitor ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of sorcery was that of lycanthropy, as it was called, a prejudice derived, it seems, in part from the Pythagorean metempsychosis. A few cases will illustrate the nature of this stupendous transformation. That it is mostly found to take place in France and in the southern districts, the country of wolves, that still make their ravages there, is a fact ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... looking, though that he did not know, where never man had been permitted to look with full knowledge since Time began. Above all he was absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold to me for five pounds; and he would retain that ignorance, for bank-clerks do not understand metempsychosis, and a sound commercial education does not include Greek. He would supply me—here I capered among the dumb gods of Egypt and laughed in their battered faces—with material to make my tale sure—so sure that the world would ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Nature's Prince be such a prodigal? Is he not rather the great psychological heart of the universe through which the same life-current, the same intellect flows back and forth forever? But here! We are drifting into metempsychosis—are in a fair way to get ourselves excommunicated. Furthermore, we are actually predicating a probability that the editor of the Chicago Inter-Ocean is a reincarnation of Balaam's ass. I am not prepared to assert that Spiritualism is all brazen ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... innovation, metastasis, deviation, turn, evolution, revolution; diversion; break. transformation, transfiguration; metamorphosis; transmutation; deoxidization[Chem]; transubstantiation; mutagenesis[Genet], transanimation[obs3], 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. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in no other German. Poe was also influenced by Hoffmann, but Poe's whole world is the supernatural, and where Hoffmann slips with fantastic but logical changes from the real to the unreal, Poe's metempsychosis is the real in his world and he has a deeper insight into the world of terror. The difference between Hawthorne and Hoffmann is even more striking, for in the American the supernatural is the embodiment ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... 4,000l. a-year for thirty years gives 120,000l. So that he will receive for the term of his natural life just one hundred pounds for every minute that he sat as Lord Chancellor." Pleasant incubation this! Sitting 20 hours, and hatching a fortune. If there be any truth in metempsychosis, Jocky Campbell must be the goose that laid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... uncoloured by fables which illustrate it and lend it a motive by which it can justify itself verbally. Metempsychosis, heaven and hell, Christ's suffering for every sinner, are notions by which charity has often been guided and warmed. Like myth everywhere, these notions express judgments which they do not originate, although they may strengthen or distort them in giving them expression. The same ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... we bury in the earth, but there are others more deeply loved for whom our souls are winding-sheets, whose memory mingles daily with our heart-beats; we think of them as we breathe; they are in us by the tender law of a metempsychosis special to love. A soul is within my soul. When some good thing is done by me, when some true word is spoken, that soul acts and speaks. All that is good within me issues from that grave, as the fragrance of a lily fills the air; sarcasm, bitterness, all that you ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... has been interpreted by modern scholars (see pp. 107-113), and he is followed by Mr. T. Rice Holmes in his study of Caesar's Conquest of Gaul, pp. 532-536. The Druidic cult of belief in immortality, metempsychosis, ritual of the grove, augury, human sacrifice, is all set out and discussed. These are the continental Druidic beliefs and practices, and they may be compared with the Druidic Irish beliefs and practices in Eugene O'Curry's Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, lect. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... succession of other bodies, of animals or men. From the nakedness and desolation of unclothed spirit, and the possibility which this notion held out of some close contact with a holy and just judge, the soul shrank back to the hope of the metempsychosis, and hoped rather to dwell in the body of a brute, than be utterly unclothed and mingle with spirits. This is the delusion cherished by the people of India and many other lands to this day. How unsatisfactory to the dying sinner this uncertainty. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... shirt over the other clothes of the young urchins, and lopping off I don't well know how many hairs from their crowns, mumbling certain apostrophized and expiatory words, they visibly, openly, and plainly, by a Pythagorical metempsychosis, without the least hurt, transmogrify them into such birds as you now see; much after the fashion of the Egyptian heathens, who used to constitute their isiacs by shaving them and making them put on certain linostoles, or surplices. However, I don't know, my good friends, but that these ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... new creed, which should combine all that was best in the religious systems which he was acquainted with, and omit what was superfluous or objectionable. He adopted the Dualism of the Zoroastrians, the metempsychosis of India, the angelism and demonism of the Talmud, and the Trinitarianism of the Gospel of Christ. Christ himself he identified with Mithra, and gave Him his dwelling in the sun. He assumed to be the Paraclete promised by Christ, who should ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... is horrible. In the horrible occasionally is the sublime. To Gotama it was merely absurd. He blew on it. Abruptly, the categories of the infinite, the infant gods, shapes divine and demoniac, the entire phantasmagoria of metempsychosis, seemed really absorbed and Brahm himself ablated. For a moment the skies, sterilized by a breath, seemingly were vacant. Actually they were never more peopled. Behind the pall, tossed on an antique faith, new gods were crouching and waiting. Buddhistic atheism had ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... he has a profound abhorrence. His view of himself is, I suppose, of a brilliant and capable man who holds his own and makes himself felt. The only result on the mind, from contemplating him, is that one revels in the possibility of metempsychosis and pictures him as being born again to some dreary and thankless occupation, a scavenger or a sewer-cleaner, or, better still, penned in the body of some absurd and inefficient animal, a slug or a jelly-fish, where he might learn to be ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... druids probably taught the same doctrine as the Greek philosophers. The metempsychosis, a prominent article of this creed, may have been derived from the Pythagoreans, but more probably it was one of the many relics of patriarchal belief which were engrafted on all pagan religions. They also taught that the universe would never be entirely destroyed, supposing ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... unchangeable soul (atta) but it emphasizes the reality and importance of that personality which all accept as true for practical purposes. It is probable that in practice this belief differed little from the ordinary Brahmanic doctrine of metempsychosis and this may be one reason for the prevalence ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Christian, by the number of religious houses erected on its shores, through a yet earlier stage of its existence performed the laborious task of carving out the vale of Grantham, and so adding to the varied beauty of our county; then, by a kind of metempsychosis of the river spirit, it was absorbed in the body of the larger Trent; the two, like “John Anderson, my Joe,” and his contented spouse, “climbed the hill together,” to the Lincoln Gap, and hand in hand wended their seaward way, to help each other, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... originality in this part of his teaching. It all depends on the doctrine of transmigration or rebirth (παλιγγενεσια {palingenesia}), which is often incorrectly designated by the late and inaccurate term 'metempsychosis'. There is no doubt that Pythagoras taught this, and also the rule of abstinence from animal flesh which is its natural corollary, but such ideas had been well known in many parts of Greece before his time. The real difficulty is to see ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the only intelligible theory of immortality that was possible. The idea that the same soul successively animated infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, and maturity, was, he argued, but a modification of the curious East Indian dream of metempsychosis, according to which every soul is supposed to inhabit in ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy |
