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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 Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade (2002)

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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)

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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.