A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that … - Mircea Eliade

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There are five possible operations for any army. If you can fight, fight; if you cannot fight, defend; if you cannot defend, flee; if you cannot flee, surrender; if you cannot surrender, die.

Mircea Eliade

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.

Religious, Art, Mean, False, Misses, Study

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Man becomes aware of the Sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the Profane. . . In his encounters with the Sacred, man experiences a reality that does not belong to our world yet is encountered in and through objects or events that are part of the world.

Reality, Men, Our World, Sacred, Aware

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.

Adventure, Adventures, Hero, Man, Men, Mythic

The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany. . . . One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.

Believe, Believes, Eternity, Forget, Forgets, Reality

Do what he will, he [the profane man] is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he himself is a product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present in him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being.

Men, Past, Reality, Inheritor, Forms, Man

As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth".

Dark, Die, Earth, Grasped, Long, Troubled