Prominent people who accepted reincarnation and/or appeared to recall past lives

Many great figures in history have embraced the idea of reincarnation. This of course neither proves nor disproves the concept, but it can certainly be interesting to note.

 

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• Pythagoras (Greek philosopher & mathematician, c.580-c.500 BC) - the central focus of his teachings was the theory of reincarnation, where the soul has the ability to survive the death of the body, and exist in immortality from body to body. His view of the purpose of the soul was to gain release from the cycle of incarnations through purification. Various forms of purification ranged from respecting elders and controlling one's temper through to philosophy and the search for wisdom - a driving force behind his work in mathematics. According to Diogenes Leartius, his biographer, Pythagoras had memories of some of his past lives.
• Socrates (Greek philosopher & logician, 469-399 BC) - "I am confident there is truly such a thing as living again. That the living spring from the dead and the souls of the dead are in existence."
• Plotinus (Greek philosopher & founder of Neo-Platonism, 204-270) - "Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave because he abused his power and because the fall is to his future good. Those that have money will be made poor -- and to the good poverty is no hindrance. Those that have unjustly killed, are killed in turn, unjustly as regards the murderer but justly as regards the victim, and those that are to suffer are thrown into the path of those that administer the merited treatment. It is not an accident that makes a man a slave; no one is a prisoner by chance; every bodily outrage has its due cause. The man once did what he now suffers. A man that murders his mother will become a woman and be murdered by a son; a man that wrongs a woman will become a woman, to be wronged." - Enneads, III:2:15, trans. S. MacKenna
• Giordano Bruno (Italian philosopher, 1548-1600) -

  "I have held and hold souls to be immortal.... Speaking as a Catholic, they do not pass from body to body, but go to paradise, purgatory or hell. But I have reasoned deeply, and, speaking as a philosopher, since the soul is not found without body and yet is not body, it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body." - his trial in Venice, 1592

• François Voltaire (French philosopher, 1694-1778) - "It is no more surprising to be born once than to be born twice: everything in nature is resurrection."
• Benjamin Franklin (US statesman, philosopher & inventor, 1706-1790) - At twenty-two he wrote his famous epitaph: "The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding) lies here, food for worms: but the work shall not be lost, it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more elegant edition .... revised and corrected by the author."
• Gotthold Lessing (German philosopher and dramatist, 1729-1781) -

  "Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge? Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?" - The Education of the Human Race.

• Johann Wolfgang von Geothe (German poet and dramatist, 1749-1832) - "I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times... Man is a dialogue between nature and God. On other planets this dialogue will doubtless be of a higher and profounder character. What is lacking is Self-Knowledge. After that the rest will follow." - Memoirs of Johannes Falk
• August Wilhelm von Schlegel (German scholar and poet, 1767-1845) - author of 'The Language and Wisdom of the Indians'.

  "The divine origin of man, as taught in Vedanta, is continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and re-incorporation with Divinity as the one primary object of every action and reaction. Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigour of Oriental idealism like a feeble Promethean spark in the full fold of heavenly glory of the noonday sun, faltering and feeble and ever ready to be extinguished."

• William Wordsworth (English poet, 1770-1850) -

  "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come..."

• Richard Wagner (German composer, 1813-1883) - "in contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow"
• Henry David Thoreau (US social critic, writer & philosopher, 1817-1862) - "I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries." - Letters
• Walt Whitman (US poet, 1819-1892) - "And as to you, Life, I reckon you are the leaving of many deaths, (no doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before)" - Song of Myself
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (US philosopher & poet, 1803-1882) -

  "It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do 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 there they stand looking out of the window , sound and well, in some strange new disguise."

• Robert Browning (English poet, 1812-1889) -

  At times I almost dream I too have spent a life the sages' way, And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance I perished in an arrogant self-reliance An age ago; and in that act, a prayer For one more chance went up so earnest, so Instinct with better light let in by Death, That life was blotted out -- not so completely But scattered wrecks enough of it remain, Dim memories; as now, when seems once more The goal in sight again. - Paracelsus

• Thomas Huxley (English zoologist & philosopher 1825-1895) - "I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times." - Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions
• Count Leo Tolstoy (Russian novelist, 1828-1910) - "As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so our present life is 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, the life of God."
• Mark Twain (US writer, 1835-1910) - "I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna." -- The Autobiography of Mark Twain
• Gustav Mahler (German composer, 1860-1911) - "We all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation."
• Rudolf Steiner (Austrian philosopher and spiritualist, 1861-1925) claimed to have gained many mystical insights into the mysteries of life and the afterlife. "Thoughts that deny reincarnation are transformed in the next life into an inner unreality, an inner emptiness of life; this inner unreality and emptiness are experienced as torment, as disharmony." - his book Reincarnation and Karma
• David Lloyd George (British Prime Minister, 1863-1945) - "The conventional heaven with its angels perpetually singing etc nearly drove me mad in my youth and made me an atheist for ten years. My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated."
• Henry Ford (US automobile pioneer, 1863-1947)

  "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 it was as if I had found a universal plan I realised that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us". - San Francisco Examiner, 26 Aug 1928

• Rudyard Kipling (English writer, 1865-1936) - "They will come back -- come back again -- as long as the red earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Do you think He would squander souls?" - The Sack of the Gods
• W. Somerset Maugham (English novelist & dramatist, 1874-1965) - "Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue our future lives will be less afflicted.
• Carl Jung (Swiss psychologist & pioneer of psychotherapy, 1875-1961) - "I can well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries ... that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task Memories, Dreams and Reflections given to me."
• Sir Hugh Dowding (British Air Marshal during the Battle of Britain, 1882-1970) expressed his views on reincarnation in a book entitled Lychgate: the Entrance to the Path and in lectures at the Theosophical Society.
• Robert Graves (English poet, 1895-1985) - "No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation - in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least."
• George S. Patton (WWII US tank corps general, 1885-1945) - claimed to remember many past lives as a soldier and based the poetry below on these experiences