Mircea Eliade Quotes

22 quotes in 370 categories

• Man becomes aware of the Sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the Profane ... In his encounters with the…
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• To believe that I could, at twenty-three, sacrifice history and culture for the Absolute was further proof that I had not understood India. My vocation…
• It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary…
• 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…
• The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.
• 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…
• 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…
• I don't want to be mediocre, this is the fear of my soul and my body.
• 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…
• to have solely one thought, but it to be capable to destroy the universe.
• As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth".
• 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…
• 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,…
• And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.
• 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…

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