Mircea Eliade Quotes

• If we pay no attention to it, time does not exist.

  Mircea Eliade

  Doe, Attention, Pay

  Mircea Eliade (1959). “Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return”

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• The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.

  Mircea Eliade

  Definitions, Way, Metaphysics

  "The Little Book of Romanian Wisdom". Book by Diana Doroftei and Matthew Cross, 2011.

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• As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth".

  Mircea Eliade

  Dark, Long, Earth

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• In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

  Mircea Eliade

  Hero, Adventure, Men

  "Myths, Dreams and Mysteries". Book by Mircea Eliade translated by Philip Mairet (p. 23), 1967.

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• Light does not come from light, but from darkness.

  Mircea Eliade

  Light, Darkness, Doe

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• The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the founding of the world: where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.

  Mircea Eliade

  Real, Space, World

  Mircea Eliade (1959). “The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany.... One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.

  Mircea Eliade

  Believe, Reality, Forget

  "Images and Symbols". Book by Mircea Eliade, p. 90-91, 1952.

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• Man becomes aware of the Sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the Profane.

  Mircea Eliade

  Reality, Men, Our World

  "Das Heilige und das Profane". Book by Mircea Eliade, 1957.

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• The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.

  Mircea Eliade

  Religious, Men, Play

  "Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet". Book by Mircea Eliade, p. 148, 1982.

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• It would be frightening to think that in all the Cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one's destiny lacks meaning.

  Mircea Eliade

  Destiny, Thinking, Perception

  "The Little Book of Romanian Wisdom". Book by Diana Doroftei and Matthew Cross, 2011.

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• The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.

  Mircea Eliade

  Men, Medicine, Sick

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• Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacrilizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.

  Mircea Eliade

  Men, World, Sacred

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• For those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality.

  Mircea Eliade

  Religious, Reality, Stones

  Mircea Eliade (1959). “The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Do what he will, he [the profane man] is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he himself is a product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present in him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being.

  Mircea Eliade

  Past, Reality, Men

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• I don't want to be mediocre, this is the fear of my soul and my body.

  Mircea Eliade

  Soul, Body, Want

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• The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but sacred, the ganz andere or 'wholly other.'

  Mircea Eliade

  Tree, Earth, Stones

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• Water symbolizes the whole of potentiality - the source of all possible existence.

  Mircea Eliade

  Water, Source, Existence

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• A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it - the element of the sacred.

  Mircea Eliade

  Religious, Art, Mean

  "Patterns in Comparative Religion". Book by Mircea Eliade, p. xiii, 1963.

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• When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also a revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogenous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.

  Mircea Eliade

  Reality, Space, Sacred

  "The Structure of Religious Knowing: Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan". Book by John Daniel Dadosky, p. 89, 2004.

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• And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.

  Mircea Eliade

  Useless, Realizing, Melancholy

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• Whether religion is man-made is a question for philosophers or theologians. But the forms are man-made. They are a human response to something. As a historian of religions, I am interested in those expressions.

  Mircea Eliade

  Men, Expression, Philosopher

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• To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior.

  Mircea Eliade

  Religious, Men, Choices

  Mircea Eliade (1959). “The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• to have solely one thought, but it to be capable to destroy the universe.

  Mircea Eliade

  Universe, Capable

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• Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product.

  Mircea Eliade

  Reality, Historical, Looks

  Mircea Eliade (1989). “Journal II, 1957-1969”, p.269, University of Chicago Press

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• The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.

  Mircea Eliade

  Reality, Men, Identity

  Mircea Eliade (2005). “The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History”, p.5, Princeton University Press

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