Richard Bach
"Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating or fighting or power in the Folks? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth. The same rule hold for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. LEARN NOTHING, AND NEXT WORLD IS THE SAME AS THIS ONE, ALL THE SAME LIMITATIONS AND LEAD WEIGHTS TO OVERCOME."
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach