Mircea Eliade quotes

Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religions, philosopher, and novelist, renowned for his analysis of myth and spirituality. His scholarly works have had a profound influence on the study of religion and comparative mythology. He contributed significantly to the understanding of sacred and profane in human experience. Here are 45 of his quotes:

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)
The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics. View quote
Mircea Eliade
The History of Religions is destined to play an important role in contemporary cultural life. View quote
Mircea Eliade
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. View quote
Mircea Eliade
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. View quote
Mircea Eliade
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... View quote
Mircea Eliade
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. View quote
Mircea Eliade
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 embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected. View quote
Mircea Eliade
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. View quote
Mircea Eliade
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. View quote
Mircea Eliade
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)
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 was culture, not sainthood. View quote
Mircea Eliade
As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth. View quote
Mircea Eliade
He who 'makes' real things is he who knows the secret of making them. View quote
Mircea Eliade
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. View quote
Mircea Eliade
Further, exegetes and theologians agree that the New Testament also does not contain an explicit doctrine of the Trinity. View quote
Mircea Eliade
And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is. View quote
Mircea Eliade
Light does not come from light, but from darkness. View quote
Mircea Eliade
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. View quote
Mircea Eliade
to have solely one thought, but it to be capable to destroy the universe. View quote
Mircea Eliade
The hearer of myth, regardless of his level of culture, when he is listening to a myth, forgets, as it were, his particular situation and is projected into another world, into another universe which is no longer his poor little universe of every day.... The myths are true because they are sacred, because they tell him about sacred beings and events. Consequently, in reciting or listening to a myth, one resumes contact with the sacred and with reality, and in so doing one transcends the profane condition, the "historical situation." In other words one goes beyond the temporal condition and the dull self-sufficiency which is the lot of every human being simply because every human being is "ignorant" - in the sense that he is identifying himself, and Reality, with his own particular situation. And ignorance is, first of all, this false identification of Reality with what each one of us appears to be or to possess. (Mircea Eliade)
These thirty years, and more, that I've spent among exotic, barbaric, indomitable gods and goddesses, nourished on myths, obsessed by symbols, nursed and bewitched by so many images which have come down to me from those submerged worlds, today seem to me to be the stages of a long initiation. Each one of these divine figures, each of these myths or symbols, is connected to a danger that was confronted and overcome. How many times I was almost lost, gone astray in this labyrinth where I risked being killed... These were not only bits of knowledge acquired slowly and leisurely in books, but so many encounters, confrontations, and temptations. I realize perfectly well now all the dangers I skirted during this long quest, and, in the first place, the risk of forgetting that I had a goal... that I wanted to reach a "center." View quote
Mircea Eliade
It is only through the discovery of History - more precisely by the awakening of the historical consciousness in Judaeo-Christianity and its propagation by Hegel and his successors - it is only through the radical assimilation of the new mode of being represented by human existence in the world that myth could be left behind. But we hesitate to say that mythical thought has been abolished. As we shall soon see, it managed to survive, though radically changed (if not perfectly camouflaged). And the astonishing fact is that, more than anywhere else it survives in historiography! View quote
Mircea Eliade
In archaic and traditional societies, the surrounding world is conceived as a microcosm. At the limits of this closed world begins the domain of the unknown, of the formless. On this side there is ordered - because of inhabited and organized - space; on the other, outside this familiar space, there is the unknown and dangerous region of the demons, the ghosts, and the dead and foreigners - in a world, chaos or death or night. This image of an inhabited microcosm, surrounded by desert regions as a chaos or a kingdom of the dead, has survived even in highly evolved civilizations such as those of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt. View quote
Mircea Eliade
The worldly man lives in society, marries, establishes a family; Yoga prescribes absolute solitude and chastity. The worldly man is "possessed” by his own life; the yogin refuses to "let himself live”; to continual movement, he opposes his static posture, the immobility of āsana; to agitated, unrhythmical, changing respiration, he opposes prānāyāma, and even dreams of holding his breath indefinitely; to the chaotic flux of psychomental life, he replies by "fixing thought on a single point,” the first step to that final withdrawal from the phenomenal world which he will obtain through pratyāhāra. All of the yogic techniques invite to one and the same gesture-to do exactly the opposite of what human nature forces one to do. From solitude and chastity to samyama, there is no solution of continuity. The orientation always remains the same-to react against the "normal,” "secular,” and finally "human” inclination. View quote
Mircea Eliade