Mircea Eliade Quotes & Sayings

A religious symbol conveys its message even if it is no longer consciously understood in every part. For a symbol speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelligence. — Mircea Eliade

It is above all the valorizing of the present that requires emphasizing. The simple fact of existing, of living in time, can comprise a religious dimension. This dimension is not always obvious, since sacrality is in a sense camouflaged in the immediate, in the "natural" and the everyday. The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing - even fugitively - in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. Like so many others before and after them, the Greeks learned that the surest way to escape from time is to exploit the wealth, at first sight impossible to suspect, of the lived instant. — Mircea Eliade

To have solely one thought, but it to be capable to destroy the universe. — 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. — Mircea Eliade

Hesse's Journey to the East (1951) in the fifties anticipated the occult revival of the late sixties. But who will interpret for us the amazing success of Rosemary's Baby and 2001? I am merely asking the question. — Mircea Eliade

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

I wanted to study them all; obviously, not as a specialist, but still rigorously, working directly from texts, because I have a horror of improvisation and hearsay learning. — 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. — 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. — 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

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

It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection. — 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. — Mircea Eliade

Water symbolizes the whole of potentiality - the source of all possible existence. — Mircea Eliade

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. — Mircea Eliade

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

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

Light does not come from light, but from darkness. — 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. — Mircea Eliade

My religion: Very seldom do I feel a need for the presence of God. I don't pray and I don't know how to pray. When I enter a church, I try to pray, but I can't tell if I succeed or not. But often I have religious "attacks": the desire for isolation, for contemplation far from other people. Despair. The desire (and the hope) for asceticism. — Mircea Eliade

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

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

And since a more convincing argument could not be found - aside from a fatal accident or suicide - this way was chosen: a process of galloping senescence. — Mircea Eliade

If we pay no attention to it, time does not exist. — Mircea Eliade

Every religion implies that it treats the problem of being and nonbeing, life and death. Their languages are different, but they speak about the same things. — Mircea Eliade

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

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

When one approaches an exotic spirituality, one understands principally what one is predestined to understand by one's own vocation, by one's own cultural orientation and that of the historical moment to which one belongs. — 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. — 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. — Mircea Eliade

And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is. — Mircea Eliade

The joy of life is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. — 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. — 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 ... — Mircea Eliade

Through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an "escape from time" comparable to the "emegence from time" effected by myths. ( ... ) Reading projects him out if his personal duration and incorporates him into other rythms, makes him live in another "history". — Mircea Eliade

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