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In short, myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary.

— Mircea Eliade Myth and Reality (1963)

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

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

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.