W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I like the idea of reincarnation. I'm not a true believer, but I think the idea is beautiful, that life just doesn't stop. For soulmates, it's the term that I'm a little bit skeptical of. As soon as you put a label on something, it seems like that's it, you're done. Obviously I believe in love and making it last forever, but what's beautiful about that is you don't know if it's going to last forever. When you don't know that this is it, you, I think, enjoy it more.

When we die, our souls still live. If you are a gangster or a bastard or a crook, your soul inhabits a donkey or something terrible.

Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth.

If you think about the concept of reincarnation, it's essentially uploading yourself and your spirit into a new form, a new hard drive as it were.

I wish there was such a thing as reincarnation.

I think if you believe in past lives, I must have been an extremely deprived being. I must have been mistreated, beaten, and forced into indentured servitude because this life has just been phenomenal.

For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

Anybody that has had a brush with what feels like undiluted evil often ends up asking themselves the same questions - whether it's something that was a consequence of their own actions or actions that were taken against them or actions that they were caught up in.

The Soul which is approaching its' liberation, as it looks back over past lives... down the vistas of the centuries along which it has slowly been climbing,... is able to see there the way in which the bonds were made, the causes which set it in motion. It is able to see how many of those causes have worked themselves out and... how many... are still working themselves out.

And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

Life is like a piece of string with a lot of knots tied in it. The knots are the karma you're born with from all your past lives, and the object of human life is to try and undo all those knots. That's what chanting and meditation in God consciousness can do. Otherwise you simply tie another ten knots each time you try to undo one knot. That's how karma works.

When there exists anywhere a state of suffering, a wrong, a condition of affairs that men of feeling deplore and that troubles the conscience of the upright, to become resigned to it is wicked. Although the evil flaunts itself before our eyes, and no remedy is in sight, we must go and seek a remedy. In the creation of the God of Justice, evil can be but a transitory state.

I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation... time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock... I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.

Poverty, disease, sorrow, imprisonment and other evils are the fruits borne by the tree of one's own sins.

Evil events from evil causes spring, And what you suffer flows from what you've done.

Its not possible to do the wrong thing. You do what you do and you experience the consequences of what you do. If you do not experience this before you doe, your soul creates a new life so that you can. This is reincarnation. Eventually, you treat people as you would like to be treated.

As we sin, so do we suffer

Reincarnation?” He shrugged. “I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s real. But I’ve never seen anything that disproves it either. I believe the afterlife is better than what we have here—and it would take something extraordinary to make someone willing to come back.

I don't like the idea that I am going to come back as an ant or a sparrow if I don't get along in the great karma of life.

I don't believe in reincarnation. That's a cop-out, I know. I don't really want to be reincarnated.

Justice is not Healing. Healing cometh only by suffering and patience, and maketh no demand, not even for Justice. Justice worketh only within the bonds of things as they are... and therefore though Justice is itself good and desireth no further evil, it can but perpetuate the evil that was, and doth not prevent it from the bearing of fruit in sorrow.

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.

Those who inflict must suffer, for they see The work of their own hearts, and this must be Our chastisement or recompense.

It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.