Quotes from Nikos Kazantzakis

Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and *look* for trouble.

All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven't the time to write, and all those who have the time don't live them! D'you see?

The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.

True teachers use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.

While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realise - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.

Beauty always had a purpose: to be of service to life.

What happiness this is: to fly, skimming over the earth just as we do in our dreams! Life has become a dream. Can this be the meaning of paradise?

Every man is half God, half man; he is both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: It is universal.

God hates a half-devil ten times more than an arch-devil!

May God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons - and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them; they run off - and how will you ever get control of them again!

Never in my life have I feared death as much as I feared that resurrection.

Life's true face is the skull.

True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.

Life on earth means: the sprouting of wings.

We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.

Life is a crusade in the service of God. Whether we wished to or not, we set out as crusaders to free - not the Holy Sepulcher - but that God buried in matter and in our souls.

The masses do not see the Sirens. They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them... and royally squander their lives with her.

Nothing is nearer to us than heaven. The earth is beneath our feet, and we tread upon it, but heaven is within us.

I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge or Virtue or Goodness or Victory but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!

That part of Christ's nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives.

Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite.

The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.

This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.