"Metempsychosis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conceptions, would be drawn upwards to the great Intelligence of which it is the offspring, to the very god, and become one with him—absorbed into him, as the rain-drop fallen from a cloud rises again and is reunited to its parent vapor. Then—for there may be a metempsychosis—your songful spirit might revive to inform a nightingale, then ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... figures, in which the human form is strangely 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. Now the connection between these styles of art, and the countries in which they were developed, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... 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 passive ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... unjustly executed white lilies are said to spring as a token of the person's innocence; and from that of a maiden, three lilies which no one save her lover must gather. The sex, moreover, it may be noted, is kept up even in this species of metempsychosis[31]. Thus, in a Servian folk-song, there grows out of the youth's body a green fir, out of the maiden's a red rose, which entwine together. Amongst further instances quoted by Grimm, we are told how, "a child carries home a bud which the angel ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... itself; Trismegistus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Homer, Pindarus, Phaerecides Syrus, Epictetus, with the Chaldees and Egyptians, affirmed the soul to be immortal, as did those British [997]Druids of old. The [998]Pythagoreans defend Metempsychosis; and Palingenesia, that souls go from one body to another, epota prius Lethes unda, as men into wolves, bears, dogs, hogs, as they were inclined in their lives, or participated ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... where I am. Beulah, put down that window, will you? Mary must think that I have been converted into a Polar bear; and, mother, have some coal brought up. If there is any truth in the metempsychosis of the Orient, I certainly was a palm tree or a rhinoceros in the last stage of my existence." She shivered, and wrapped a heavy shawl ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... A very short word for a very long process, and untranslatable by any English equivalent. It means the whole system of the laws of metempsychosis, running in a long chain forward into the future, and ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... a sleep. The idea of pre-existence was a favorite one of the ancient philosophers. The doctrine of metempsychosis, a form of the same idea, was held by the ancient Egyptians and is still maintained ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... a religion, was a mass of confusion, wherein the instinctive notions of the human race concerning the origin and destiny of the world and of mankind were mingled with the oriental dreams of metempsychosis—that pretended transmigration, at successive periods, of immortal souls into divers creatures. This confusion was worse confounded by traditions borrowed from the mythologies of the East and the North, by shadowy remnants of a symbolical worship paid ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... complete, was dispelled. My 'great mission' was not fully developed at the first session; but when I had become perfectly clairaudient (I never became clairvoyant), and could dispense with the pencil, a queer mixture of metempsychosis and Parseeism was poured into my ear. It ran somewhat as follows: The two beings first created were, a Lucifer predominant in love, and a Lucifer predominant in intellect; whom we may call the Love Lucifer and the Intellectual Lucifer. The latter was the individual who fell, who played ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
