#rebirth

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#hyde #jekyll #rebirth #robert-louis-stevenson #transformation

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#new-york-city #rebirth #life

Death is many things, including the beginning of something new. ↗

— Dawn Akemi

#inspiration #rebirth #death

Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion. ↗

— Dalai Lama

#appreciate #believes #compassion #kindness #rebirth

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China's Communists. ↗

— Dalai Lama

#authority #china #clear #communists #concerned

The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War. ↗

— Kenzaburo Oe

#basis #chose #eternal #eternal peace #japanese

At the age of 80, I'm becoming a visual artist. This could be my rebirth. ↗

— Harry Seidler

#artist #becoming #could #i #rebirth

Blackthorne, beside the gates, was still turmoiled by his boundless joy at her reprieve and he remembered how his own will had been stretched that night of his near-seppuku, when he had had to get up as a man and walk home as a man unsupported, and became samurai. And he watched her, despising the need for this courage, yet understanding it, even honoring it. ↗

— James Clavell

#samurai #samurai-bushido-seppuku #strength-of-mind #courage

The phoenix must burn to emerge. ↗

— Janet Fitch

#failure #rebirth #death

You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity. (24) ↗

— Stephen Levine

#death #joy #life #mindfulness #rebirth