The Romanian Icon I would like to present today is Mircea Eliade (13 martie 1907, Bucharest – 22 aprilie 1986, Chicago). He was educated as a philosopher and became a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. Apart from that he was also a great novelist. Noted for his vast erudition, Eliade had fluent command of five languages (Romanian, French, German, Italian, and English) and a reading knowledge of three others (Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit).
“I don’t want to be mediocre, this is the fear of my soul and my body.”
“It would be frightening to think that in all the Cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one’s destiny lacks meaning.”
“The way towards ‘wisdom’ or towards ‘freedom’ is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.”
[…] essays, novels, poems, and plays, and moving in a milieu that included writers and thinkers such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, and Camil […]