Tag Archives: Mark Twain

...and other stuff, BULLSHIT, LIVES, PICTURE POEMS, POETIC NONSENSE, The Real Johannes Vermeer

REINCARNATED AS A HUMAN BEING, AGAIN

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

COMMENTS ON REINCARNATION and THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL, by famous thinkers, as these may be related to the life, death, memory erasure and reincarnation of souls on Earth:

Krishna – Bhagavad Gita  (5th Century B.C.E. or earlier)

“Learn thou! the Life is, spreading life through all; It cannot anywhere, by any means, Be anywise diminished, stayed, or changed. But for these fleeting frames which it informs with spirit deathless, endless, infinite, They perish. Let them perish, Prince! and fight! He who shall say, “Lo! I have slain a man!” He who shall think, “Lo! I am slain!” Those both know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain!”

Socrates  (469 BC–399 BC) Classical Greek philosopher.

“I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence.”

Origen  (ca. 185–ca. 254) was an early Christian scholar, theologian, and one of the most distinguished of the early fathers of the Christian Church.)

“It can be shown that an incorporeal and reasonable being has life in itself independently of the body… then it is beyond a doubt bodies are only of secondary importance and arise from time to time to meet the varying conditions of reasonable creatures. Those who require bodies are clothed with them, and contrariwise, when fallen souls have lifted themselves up to better things their bodies are once more annihilated. They are ever vanishing and ever reappearing.”

Voltaire (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), Enlightenment writer and philosopher

“It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.

“I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.” And, “Finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other always exist.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) American essayist

“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. The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.”

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) American poet

“I know I am deathless. No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. I laugh at what you call dissolution, and I know the amplitude of time.”

Helena Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, Vol. II, p. 424 (12 August 1831— May 8, 1891)

“That which is part of our souls is eternal. . . Those lives are countless, but the soul or spirit that animates us throughout these myriads of existences is the same; and though “the book and volume” of the physical brain may forget events within the scope of one terrestrial life, the bulk of collective recollections can never desert the divine soul within us. Its whispers may be too soft, the sound of its words too far off the plane perceived by our physical senses; yet the shadow of events that were, just as much as the shadow of the events that are to come, is within its perceptive powers, and is ever present before its mind’s eye.”

Herman Hesse (2 July 1877—9 August 1962)

“He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.”

Jack London, author, best known for book “Call of the Wild”

“I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.”

Albert Schweitzer (14 January, 1875 – 4 September, 1965) Alsatian theologian, who  received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

“Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.”

Mark Twain  (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910) American Author

“I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.”

Mahatma Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) leader of the Indian independence movement.

“I cannot think of permanent enmity between man and man, and believing as I do in the theory of reincarnation, I live in the hope that if not in this birth, in some other birth I shall be able to hug all of humanity in friendly embrace.”

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) Founder of the Ford Motor Company

“I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26. Genius is experience. Some think to seem that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. I am in exact accord with the belief of Thomas Edison that spirit is immortal, that there is a continuing center of character in each personality. But I don’t know what spirit is, nor matter either. I suspect they are forms of the same thing. I never could see anything in this reputed antagonism between spirit and matter. To me this is the most beautiful, the most satisfactory from a scientific standpoint, the most logical theory of life. For thirty years I have leaned toward the theory of Reincarnation. It seems a most reasonable philosophy and explains many things. No, I have no desire to know what, or who I was once; or what, or who, I shall be in the ages to come. This belief in immortality makes present living the more attractive. It gives you all the time there is. You will always be able to finish what you start. There is no fever or strain in such an outlook. We are here in life for one purpose—to get experience. We are all getting it, and we shall all use it somewhere.”

General George S. Patton (November 11, 1885 – December 21, 1945) U.S. Army officer

“Through the travail of the ages,
Midst the pomp and toil of war,
Have I fought and strove and perished,
Countless times upon this star.

So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, – but always me.”

________________________________________

Excerpted from the Introductory pages of the book VERMEER: PORTRAITS OF A LIFETIME, by Lawrence R. Spencer

Support independent publishing: Buy this e-book on Lulu.

...and other stuff, FREE ADVICE, READING MATTER, UNIVERSES

AMBITIOUS ADVICE

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Mark_Twain_1907

Repost from an article in “Quoteinvestigator.com”:

“The following compelling advice is credited to Mark Twain in self-help books and on websites. It is valuable guidance in my opinion:

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

While searching to learn more about the saying I came across another version which used a different wording. The word “people” was replaced with “those”, and “feel” was replaced with “believe”:

“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”

Did Twain say or write either of these expressions?

Quote Investigator: The earliest evidence known to QI was published in 1938 in the memoir of an extraordinary elocutionist who gave recitals at Chautauquas around the United States. Chautauquas were assemblies that combined entertainment and education by presenting lecturers, preachers, musicians, and other performers to a largely rural audience. Gay Zenola MacLaren wrote in her memoir that she met Mark Twain when she was still a child who aspired to be a great performer. Twain offered her the following counsel:

He opened the door for me himself. As we said good-bye, he put his fingers lightly under my chin and lifted my head up so that my eyes met his.

“Little girl,” he said earnestly, “keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

The date of the meeting was not listed in the book.

In 1901 a review of a performance by MacLaren was published in a Brooklyn, New York newspaper:

She has an almost ventriloquistic power of changing her voice from the light tones of women to the heavier speaking of men, so the recital was thoroughly well balanced and was given with intelligence.

In 1909 the periodical “The Lyceumite and Talent” printed an advertisement for Gay Zenola MacLaren that included a testimonial statement from Mark Twain:

Opinions from Prominent Men

An unusually gifted young lady. Mark Twain.

I do not hesitate to say that I think Miss MacLaren’s work phenomenal. She is a genius. Major James B. Pond.

Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.

In 1938 Time magazine reviewed MacLaren’s memoir and noted that she “got her big chance at the New York Chautauqua”. The magazine presented an eclectic list of participants at Chautauquas:

Thereafter she followed the Chautauqua circuit, along with chalk-talk artists, bell ringers, evangelists, yodlers, zither performers, magicians, bagpipe players, ventriloquists and the strange assortment of educators and entertainers who, in brown tents pitched in small towns all over the U. S., spread culture to apathetic audiences before the War.

zenola04

In 1948 a large compilation of quotations titled “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips” edited by Caroline Thomas Harnsberger was published. The statement was included, and the accompanying citation pointed to MacLaren’s memoir:

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

P. 66—Morally We Roll Along—MacLaren

———————-

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/23/belittle-ambitions/

...and other stuff, ART, FREE ADVICE, LIVES, MORTALITY MECHANIC'S MANUAL, PICTURE POEMS, POETIC NONSENSE, READING MATTER, UNIVERSES

MARK TWAIN: THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

MARK TWAIN on death

Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow.
– on monument erected to Mark Twain & Ossip Gabrilowitsch

All say, “How hard it is that we have to die”– a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
– The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of the Extraordinary Twins

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
– The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of the Extraordinary Twins

The Impartial Friend: Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all–the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.
– Mark Twain, last written statement; Moments with Mark Twain, Paine

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.
– Following the Equator

Death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old and weary and broken of heart.
– Adam speech, 1883

Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain; a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats,humiliations, and despairs–the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
– Letters from the Earth

Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.
– Letter to Olivia Clemens, 7/1/1885 (referring to General Grant)

How lovely is death; and how niggardly it is doled out.
– Letter to Olivia Clemens, 8/19/1896

It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man’s meat is inferior to pork.
– More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

[I am] not sorry for anybody who is granted the privilege of prying behind the curtain to see if there is any contrivance that is half so shabby and poor and foolish as the invention of mortal life.
– Letter to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 1894

I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead–and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.
– Mark Twain in Eruption

To die one’s self is a thing that must be easy, & light of consequence; but to lose a part of one’s self–well, we know how deep that pang goes, we who have suffered that disaster, received that wound which cannot heal.
– Letter to Will Bowen, 11/4/1888

Favored above Kings and Emperors is the stillborn child.
– Notebook, #42 1898

All people have had ill luck, but Jairus’s daughter & Lazarus the worst.
– Notebook #42, 1898

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.
– Notebook #42, 1898

Death is so kind, so benignant, to whom he loves; but he goes by us others & will not look our way.
– Letter to W. D. Howells, 12/20/1898

A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.
– “The Last Words of Great Men”, 1869

Death….a great Leveler — a king before whose tremendous majesty shades & differences in littleness cannot be discerned — an Alp from whose summit all small things are the same size.
– Letter to Olivia Clemens, 10/15/1871

FREE ADVICE, LIVES, READING MATTER

CLEMENS VONNEGUT: THE REINCARNATED WRITER

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) died in 1910.  It seems very likely and plausible (if you know about reincarnation) that he was reincarnated as Kurt Vonnegut in 1922.  The resemblance between the two writers is uncanny in their events of their respective lives, there physical appearance, personal philosophies, writing and styles and by the fact that they were both prodigious, life-long smokers.  The resemblance and affinity between Clemens / Vonnegut was not lost on Kurt Vonnegut as you will discover the in following lecture.

Kurt Vonnegut delivered the annual Clemens Lecture at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut,  An edited version of which we present here:

On Twain, Lincoln, Imperialist Wars and the Weather  by Kurt Vonnegut

“Shock and awe.

What are the Conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us.

They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?  Smile, America. You’re on Candid Camera.

And they have turned loose a myriad of our high tech weapons, each one costing more than a hundred high schools, on a Third World country, in order to shock and awe human beings like us, like Adam and Eve, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

The other day I asked the former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq, and he said, ‘Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.’ What are Conservatives? They are people who will move Heaven and Earth, if they have to, who will ruin a company or a country or a planet, to prove to us and themselves that they are superior to everybody else, except for their pals.

They take good care of their pals, keep them out of jail – and so on. Conservatives are crazy as bedbugs. They are bullies.

Shock and awe.

Class war?  You bet.

They have proved their superiority to admirers of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain and Jesus of Nazareth by, with an able assist from television, making inconsequential our protests against their war.

What has happened to us?  We have suffered a technological calamity.

Television is now our form of government.

On what grounds did we protest their war? I could name many, but I need name only one, which is common sense.

Be that as it may, construction of the Mark Twain Museum will sooner or later be resumed. And I, the son and grandson of Indiana architects, seize this opportunity to suggest a feature which I hope will be included in the completed structure, words to be chiseled into the capstone over the main entrance.

Here is what I think would be fun to put up there, and Mark Twain loved fun more than anything. I have tinkered with something famous he said, which is:

‘Be good and you will be lonesome.’ That is from ‘Following the Equator.’OK? So envision what a majestic front entrance the Mark Twain Museum will have someday. And imagine that these words have been chiseled into the noble capstone and painted gold:

BE GOOD AND YOU WILL BE LONESOME MOST PLACES,

BUT NOT HERE, NOT HERE.

One of the most humiliated and heartbroken pieces Twain ever wrote was about the slaughter of one hundred Moro men, women and children by our soldiers during our liberation of the people of the Philippines after the Spanish American War. Our brave commander was Leonard Wood, who now has a fort named after him. Fort Leonard Wood.

What did Abraham Lincoln have to say about such American Imperialist wars? Those are wars which, on one noble pretext or another, actually aim to increase the natural resources and pools of tame labor available to the richest Americans who have the best political connections.

And it is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln in a speech about something or somebody else. He always steals the show. I am about to quote him.

Lincoln was only a Congressman when he said in 1848 what I am about to echo. He was heartbroken and humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us.

We were making California our own, and a lot of other people and properties, and doing it as though butchering Mexican soldiers who were only defending their homeland against invaders weren’t murder.

What other stuff besides California? Well, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

The person Congressman Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said was James Polk, our President at the time. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his President, our armed forces’ Commander and Chief:

Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood – that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.’

Holy smokes! I almost said, ‘Holy shit!’ And I thought I was a writer!

Do you know we actually captured Mexico City during the Mexican War?

Why isn’t that a national holiday? And why isn’t the face of James Polk up on Mount Rushmore, along with Ronald Reagan’s?

What made Mexico so evil back in the 1840’s, well before our Civil War, is that slavery was illegal there. Remember the Alamo?

My great grandfather’s name was Clemens Vonnegut. Small world, small world.

This piquant coincidence is not a fabrication.

Clemens Vonnegut called himself a ‘Freethinker,’ an antique word for Humanist. He was a hardware merchant in Indianapolis.

So, 120 years ago, say, there was one man who was both Clemens and Vonnegut. I would have liked being such a person a lot. I only wish I could have been such a person tonight.

I claim no blood relationship with Samuel Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri. ‘Clemens,’ as a first name, is, I believe, like the name ‘Clementine,’ derived from the adjective ‘clement.’ To be clement is to be lenient and compassionate, or, in the case of weather, perfectly heavenly.”