Mircea Eliade Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To Have Solely One Thought, But It To Be Capable To Destroy The Universe.

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.

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.

And I Realize How Useless Wails Are And How Gratuitous Melancholy Is.

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.

Water Symbolizes The Whole Of Potentiality - The Source Of All Possible Existence.

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.'