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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 Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

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More quotes by Mircea Eliade

The interpretations of Freud are more and more successful because they are among the myths accessible to modern man.

No Souvenirs (1977)

The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred.

It is above all the valorizing of the present that requires emphasizing.

Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade (2002)

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.

The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954)

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.

All Mircea Eliade quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now does always last.

Abraham Cowley Poems (1656)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mircea Eliade (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.