Quotes from Nikos Kazantzakis

Overdraw me Lord, and who cares if I break!

Discipline is the highest of all virtues. Only so may strength and desire be counterbalanced and the endeavors of man bear fruit.

The great difference between us is this: you believe you have found salvation, and believing this, you are saved; I believe that salvation doesn't exist, and believing this, I am saved.

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.

My son, I carry on as if I should never die.' I replied: 'And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.

Never in my life had I felt so tangibly and with such astonishment that hate, by passing successively through comprehension, mercy, and sympathy, can be transformed into love.

Oh, how crafty of religion, I cried out indignantly, to transplant rewards and punishments into a future life in order to comfort cowards and the enslaved and aggrieved, enabling them to bow their necks patiently before their masters, and to endure this earthly life without groaning (the only life of which we can be sure)!

I am a weak, ephemeral creature made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe whirling within me.

I will not accept boundaries; appearances cannot contain me; I choke! To bleed in this agony, and to live it profoundly, is the second duty. The mind is patient and adjusts itself, it likes to play; but the heart grows savage and will not condescend to play; it stifles and rushes to tear apart the nets of necessity.

Man cannot sprout wings unless he has first reached the brink of the abyss!

I hope you don't mind my saying so, boss, but I don't think your brain is quite formed yet. How old are you? —Thirty-five. —Then it never will be.

The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

in order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.

The longer I live, the more I rebel. I'm not going to give in; I want to conquer the world!

But then I was young, and to be young means to undertake to demolish the world and to have the gall to wish to erect a new and better one in its place.

Madness, Brother Masseo, is the salt which prevents good sense from rotting.

What are you looking at, grandfather? he asked with curiosity. The old man raised his head and smiled sadly. At my life flowing and disappearing, son, flowing and disappearing. Don't worry, grandfather, it knows where it is going–toward the sea, everyone's life flows toward the sea. The old man sighed. Yes, my son, that is why the sea is salty—from the many tears. He turned back to the flowing stream and did not speak again.

Leave nothing for death but a burned-out castle

I was once more struck by the truth of the ancient saying: Man's heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink.

An old fisherman heard all this and shook his head. "This is what happens to those who don't get married," he said. "All they want to do is save the world, by hook or by crook. The sperm rises to their heads and attacks their brains. For God's sake, all of you: get married, let your forces loose on women and have children in order to calm yourselves!

What do you have to fear? Nothing. Whom do you have to fear? No one. Why? Because whoever has joined forces with God obtains three great privileges: omnipotence without power, intoxication without wine, and life without death.

I pity the village where no one is a saint, but I also pity the village where everyone is a saint!

Every one follows his own bent. Man is like a tree. You've never quarrelled with a fig tree because it doesn't bear cherries, have you?

We have but a single moment at our disposal. Let us transform that moment into eternity. No other form of immortality exists