31 quotes
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.
Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade (2002)
What is involved is not a commemoration of mythical events but a reiteration of them.
Myth and Reality (1963)
This myth was created by Freud.
No Souvenirs (1977)
In virtue of this, the artisan is a connoisseur of secrets, a magician; thus all crafts include some kind off initiation and are handed down by an occult tradition. He who 'makes' real things is he who knows the secret of making them.
The Forge and the Crucible (1956)
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.
The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (1969)
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.
Patterns in Comparative Religion (1963)
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...
In one way or another one "lives" the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.
Myth and Reality (1963)
The psychological and parapsychological experience of the East in general, and of yoga in particular, is unchallengeably more extensive and more organized than the experience on which the Western theories of the structure of the psyche have been erected.
In Search of the Cradle of Civilization : New Light on Ancient India (2011)
Myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred (or the "supernatural") into the World. It is this sudden breakthrough of the sacred that really establishes the World and makes it what it is today. Furthermore, it is as a result of the intervention of Supernatural Beings that man himself is what he is today, a mortal, sexed, and cultural being...
Myth and Reality (1963)
As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth.
Misattributed to Eliade in The Little Book of Romanian Wisdom (2011)