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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

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Source, in full

The Sacred and the Profane : The Nature of Religion: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture (1961), translated from the French by William R. Trask, [first published in German as Das Heilige und das Profane (1957)]

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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)

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.

Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

All Mircea Eliade quotes →

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Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Her blue eyes sought the west afar,
For lovers love the western star.

Walter Scott The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky.

Arthur Koestler The Act of Creation (1964)

Attribution

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.