Quotes from Nikos Kazantzakis

Leave your books alone. Aren't you ashamed? Man is a wild beast, and wild beasts don't read.

God turned his face the other way, and the earth was in darkness. An eclipse of God... an eclipse of God

I lived six months with her. Since that day - God be my witness! - 1 need fear nothing. Nothing, I say. Nothing, except one thing: that the devil, or God, wipe out those six months from my memory.

By believing passionately in that which doesn't exist, you create it and that which has not been sufficiently desired is what we call the non existent -

By means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. Only two or three primitive passions had governed me until this time: fear, the struggle to conquer fear, and the yearning for freedom. But now two new passions were kindled inside me: beauty and the thirst for learning.

Oh, yes. Wife. Children. Home. Everything. The full catastrophe.

God replies every time we question him, but our flesh is bemired and almost deaf: we do not hear.

They had no fear of death, and whoever has no fear of death—the centurion had often meditated on this here in the East—whoever has no fear of death is immortal.

There, in the desert, there's hunger, thirst, prostrations—and God. Here there's food, wine, women—and God. Everywhere God. So, why go look for him in the desert?

There are three kinds of souls, three kinds of prayers. One: I am a bow in your hands, Lord. Draw me lest I rot. Two: Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break. Three: Overdraw me, and who cares if I break! "Choose!

Gradually I began to understand that it does not matter very much what problem, whether big or small, is tormenting us; the only thing that matters it that we be tormented, that we find a ground for being tormented. In other words, that we exercise our minds in order to keep certainty from turning us into idiots, that we fight to open every closed door we find in front of us.

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

She disappeared. Since then I had never thought anymore of her. Nevertheless, she must have continued to live deep down in my heart, and today, on this empty coast, she reappeared, pale and plaintive, from the depths of my being.

Keep your distance, boss! Don't make men too bold, don't go telling them we're equal, we've got the same rights, or they'll go straight and trample on your rights; they'll steal your bread and leave you to die of hunger. Keep your distance, boss, by all the good things I wish you!

The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh.

Good god how much I have suffered, but serenely, because I understood that what I endured was nothing, just a caress compared to the world's boundless misfortune.

?eytan ya?lan?nca ke?i? oluverirmi?.

It's all because of doing things by halves and saying things by halves, being good by halves, that the world is in the mess it's in today.

To do the will of God means to do my own most deeply hidden will. Within even the most unworthy of men there is a servant of God, asleep.

Take care, Friars!" he cried. "If the yearning is broken off for even an instant, the wings become chains again. Stay vigilant, fight, keep the torch of your soul burning day and night. Strike! Forge the wings! I'm going-I am in a hurry to speak to God. I'm going… These are my final words: Strike! Forge the wings!

You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord's service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love.

Time is round, and it rolls quickly.

You cannot understand how much patience I need in order not to lose my patience, so that I can withstand all this misfortune all by myself. Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Galatea Kazantzaki wr. c. June 1922

Whoever is rich, and is a communist, is an idiot, he would say. Whoever is poor, and is not a communist, is a bigger idiot.