N. Kazantzakis Quotes

What is the purpose? Do no ask. No one knows, not even God, as He advances along with us, He too, searching and being exposed to danger; He too is given a struggle. Hunger and injustice exist in the heart, as does abundance of darkness. The things you see are not specters; no matter how much blow, they will not be dispelled. They are flesh and bone. Touch them; they exist. Don't you hear a cry in the air? They are crying. What are they crying? Help! To whom they are crying? You! You: every man. Rise up. Our duty is not to ask questions, but to clasp hands one and all and mount the ascent. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Lower those sable eyes regarding me,Lower them, my jewel; they are flogging me. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
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 is that we be 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. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Creation, like love, is a seductive pursuit filled with uncertainty and fluttering heartbeats. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul's enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosant of the molds when they are unable to contain you any longer - these are the great cries of Crete. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Youth is a blind incongruous beast. It craves food but does not eat, is too timid to eat; it need simply nod to happiness, which strolls by on the street and would willingly stop, but it does not nod; it turns the faucet, permitting time to drain away uselessly and be lost, as though time were water. A beast that does not know it is a beast - such is youth. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
To refuse ever to deny your youth, right up to extreme old age, to battle all life long to transubstantiate your adolescent flowering into a fruit-ladden tree - that, I belive, is the road of the fulfilled man. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
The man who writes has an oppressive and unhappy fate. This is because the nature of his work obliges him to use words; that is, to convert his inner surge into immobility. Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover the meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Truly, nothing more resembles God's eyes than the eyes of a child; they see the world for the first time, and create it. Before this, the world is chaos. All creatures - animals, trees, men, stones; everything:forms, colors, voices, smells, lightning flashes - flow unexplained in front of the child's eyes (no, not in front of them, inside them), and he cannot fasten them down, cannot establish order. The child's world is made not of clay, to last, but of clouds. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
The human heart is a dark, unyielding mystery. It is a perforated jug with a mouth forever open; though all rivers of the earth pour in, it will remain empty and thirsting. The greatest of hopes had not filled it. Would it be filled now by the greatest of despairs? (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
There us a kind of flame in Crete - let us call it "soul" - something more powerful than either life or death. There is pride, obstinacy, valor, and together with these something else inexpressible and imponderable, something which makes you rejoice that you are a human being, and at the same time tremble. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
I had allowed my body to take whatever path it wished. The fact that it was guiding me and not I it gave me great pleasure. I had confidence. The body is not blind unwrought material when bathed in Greek light; it is suffused with abundant soul which makes it phosphoresce, and is left free, it is able to arrive at its own decision and find the correct road without the mind's intervention. Conversely, the soul is not an invisible airy phantom; it has taken on some body's sureness and warmth in its own right, and it savors the world with what you might call carnal pleasure, as though it had a mouth and nostrils and hands with which to caress this world. Man often lacks the persistence to maintain all of his humanity. He mutilates himself. Sometimes he wishes to be released from his soul sometimes from his body. To enjoy both together seems a heavy sentence. But here in Greece these two graceful, deathless elements are able to commingle like hot water with cold, the soul to take something from the body, the body from the soul. They become friends, and thus man, here on Greece's divine threshing floor, is able to live and journey unmutilated, intact. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
There is a kind of flame in Crete - let us call it "soul" - something more powerful than either life or death. There is pride, obstinacy, valor, and together with these something else inexpressible and imponderable, something which makes you rejoice that you are human being, and at the same time tremble. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
The soul knows full well (even though it pretends to forget many times) that it must render account to the paternal soil. I do not say "fatherland", I say "paternal soil". The paternal soil is something deeper, more modest, more reserved, and is composed of age-old pulverized bones.
N. Kazantzakis