Mircea Eliade

The generation preceding us gave several peaks: Ion Barbu, in poetry, Tudor Vianu, creator of aesthetic systems, none of the most refined, but solid nonetheless, Lucian Blaga, in metaphysics and the philosophy of culture, Nae Ionescu, Cezar Petrescu, novelist of failures,

If I had had the courage to speak freely, directly, without resorting to these pages in front of me, and without caring about the serious language mistakes I may make in French – and which I will definitely make –, if I had the courage to start my free conversation with

excerpts Mr. Mircea Eliade starts from the premises of the break between today's generation and the former one. Today's generation, restless, effervescent, vibrant, exulting, has a life of its own, with numerous experiences; it doesn't artificially follow

excerpt 1. Guidelines I begin, with these pages, the publication of some notes, or observations, or reflections, or monologues regarding our generation. The decision is not presumptuous, or unrealizable. It will be said that as long as a generation exists, it's a

In the last decades, particularly after the collapse of the communist regimes, ardent debates have taken place regarding the political commitment of certain great intellectuals and writers, generating even theoretical and philosophical reflections, concerning the relationship

At the beginning of the '20s, fascism represented the newest and the most catching political phenomenon. Nevertheless, it failed to be a roaring success everywhere and especially at the very beginning. In Romania, the obsession of being permanently synchronized with

excerpt After the year when its first program was launched, namely Mircea Eliade's Spiritual Itinerary, the generation of '27 (or the young generation, the generation of the '30s, the generation that lived life for life's sake, the experiential and Orthodox

The ultimate test for everyone – therefore for nations too – is the capacity to contemplate while suffering. The Asians, the Chinese and the Indians in particular, are definitely superior to us from this point of view. These people give so much importance to contemplation

Heraclitus says that bards, sycophants or mystagogues behave like people asleep when they are awake, looking towards their personal world, while people who are awake only have one single world, which is common to all of them. If this quote had been seen by Constantin Noica

The European nations are divided into two main groups: those which had a glorious Middle Ages period out of whose crises the Renaissance came out, and those which had a minimal, insignificant, derived one. The former created most of the civil, spiritual and cultural history

In the two decades between the world wars the majority of Romanian intellectuals were engaged in a grand debate about what it meant to be Romanian and how national character determined social and political development. [1] The ideological commitments of the protagonists

excerpt  VI. MONDAY, 8 TO 9, GERMAN When I was in the first grade, I flunked French, German and Romanian. I used to spend my afternoons barefoot on the pitch, sweating, short-sighted, playing oina. [1] I had become famous for the lightning rapidity with which I would catch