Top 35 Mircea Eliade Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Light does not come from light, but from darkness.”

— Mircea Eliade

2. “I don’t want to be mediocre, this is the fear of my soul and my body.”

— Mircea Eliade

3. “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

4. “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

5. “Ce oameni exceptionali trec pe langa noi, anonimi, si noi admiram prosteste atatia neghiobi, numai pentru ca au vorbit de ei presa si “opinia publica”, numai pentru ca le-a popularizat numele politica si literatura.”

— Mircea Eliade

6. “The way towards ‘wisdom’ or towards ‘freedom’ is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.”

— Mircea Eliade

7. “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

8. “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

9. “If we pay no attention to it, time does not exist.”

— Mircea Eliade

10. “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

11. “Water symbolizes the whole of potentiality – the source of all possible existence.”

— Mircea Eliade

12. “Symbolic thinking is not the exclusive privilege of the child, of the poet or of the unbalanced mind: it is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reasoning. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality – the deepest aspects – which defy any other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfill a function, that of bringing to light the most hidden modalities of being...”

— Mircea Eliade

13. “There are eras in which you can only move forward by going in the opposite direction.”

— Mircea Eliade

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Without conscious rituals of loss and renewal, individuals and societies lose the capacity to experience the sorrows and joy that are essential for feeling fully human. Without them life flattens out, and meaning drains from both living and dying. Soon there is a death of meaning and an increase in meaningless deaths.”

— Mircea Eliade

19. “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

20. “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

21. “It must be added at once that such a profane existence is never found in the pure state. 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

22. “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

23. “Every ritual repetition of the cosmogony is preceded by a symbolic retrogression to chaos. In order to be created anew, the old world must first be annihilated.”

— Mircea Eliade

24. “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

25. “The country of the souls is underneath us, toward the sunset; the trail leads through a dim twilight. Tracks of the people who last went over it and of their dogs are visible.”

— Mircea Eliade

26. “And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.”

— Mircea Eliade

27. “The majority of initiatory ordeals more or less clearly imply a ritual death followed by resurrection or a new birth. The central moment of every initiation is represented by the ceremony symbolizing the death of the novice and his return to the fellowship of the living. But he returns to life a new man, assuming another mode of being. Initiatory death signifies the end at once of childhood, ignorance, and the profane condition.”

— Mircea Eliade

28. “It is known that for the Greeks delta was a symbol for woman. The Pythagoreans regarded the triangle as the arche geneseoas because of its perfect form and because it represented the archetype of universal fertility. A similar symbolism for the triangle is to be found in India.”

— Mircea Eliade

29. “Am sentimentul vag ca libertatea individuala este o stare imperfecta de libertate, vorbi el in cele din urma, putin plictisit. Recunosc! un foarte vag si aproximativ sentiment. Cred, insa, ca o libertate colectiva, a speciei umane daca se poate, sau macar a unei anumite ramuri a acestei specii – este mult mai grandioasa, mult mai euforica...”

— Mircea Eliade

30. “The fact is that in most cases an author does not understand all the meaning of his work. Archaic symbolisms re-appear spontaneously...”

— Mircea Eliade

31. “All that essential and indescribable part of man that is called imagination dwells in realms of symbolism and still lives upon archaic myths and theologies.”

— Mircea Eliade

32. “The more a consciousness is awakened, the more it transcends its own historicity...”

— Mircea Eliade

33. “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

34. “Si mai era ceva, un amanunt care m-a obsedat apoi multa vreme: mana intreaga parea goala, degetele acelea palide si nervoase erau parca facute anume ca sa poarte un inel, si inelul acesta le lipsea. Era o mana pura, nelogodita, monahala...”

— Mircea Eliade

35. “Modern non-religious man assumes a tragic existence and his existential choice is not without its greatness.”

— Mircea Eliade

36. “Alchemy posed as a sacred science, whereas chemistry came into its own when substances had shed their sacred attributes.”

— Mircea Eliade

37. “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

38. “Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the “avant-garde” – to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.”

— Mircea Eliade

39. “The sexual classification of ores and stones was maintained in the alchemical writings and lapidaries of the Middle Ages;.”

— Mircea Eliade