# Images and Symbols  ## Metadata - Author: [[Mircea Eliade]] - Full Title: Images and Symbols - Category: #books ## Highlights - Geographical "reality" might give the lie to that paradisiac landscape, ugly and corpulent women might confront the travellers' eyes; but these they did not see; each one saw only the image he had brought with him. (Page 12) - To translate an image into a concrete terminology by restricting it to any one of its frames of reference is to do worse than mutilate itit is to annihilate, to annul it as an instrument of cognition. (Page 15) - the longing for something altogether different from the present instant; something in fact inaccessible or irretrievably lost: "Paradise" itself. (Page 17) - Etymologically, "imagination" is related to both imago-a representation or imitation-and imitor, to imitate or reproduce. And for once, etymology is in accord with both psychological realities and spiritual truth. The imagination imitates the exemplary models-the Images-reproduces, rethem without end. To have imagination is actualises and repeats and the to be able to see the world in its totality, for the power mission of the Images is to show all that remains refractory to the concept: hence the disfavour and failure of the man "without imagination"; he is cut off from the deeper reality of life and from his own soul. (Page 20) - This man in general is no more than an abstraction: he exists only on the strength of a misunderstanding due to the imperfection of language. (Page 32) - Everyone agrees that a spiritual fact, being a human fact, is necessarily conditioned by everything that works together to make a man, from his anatomy and physiology to language itself. In other words, a spiritual fact presupposes the whole human being --that is, the social man, the economic man, and so forth. But all these conditioning factors together do not, of themselves, add up to the life of the spirit. (Page 32) - The more a consciousness is awakened, the more it transcends its own historicity: we have only to remind ourselves of the mystics and sages of all times, and primarily those of the Orient. (Page 33) - since every human being tends, even unconsciously, towards the Centre, and towards his own centre, where he can find integral realitysacredness. (Page 54) - death is often only the result of our indifference to immortality. (Page 56) - In narrating a myth, one reactualises, in some sort, the sacred time in which the events narrated took place. (Page 57) - the myth is supposed to happen-if one may say soin a non-temporal time, in an instant without duration, as certain mystics and philosophers conceived of eternity. (Page 57) - ignorance is, first of all, this false identification of Reality with what each one of us appears to be or to possess. (Page 59) - One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity (Page 91)