Nikos Quotes

ADAM AND EVE, sitting in Paradise, chatting:
"If we could only open the gate and leave," says Eve.
"To go where, my dearest?"
"If we could only open the gate and leave!"
"Outside is sickness, pain, death!"
"If we could only open the gate and leave! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

The truth is that we all are one, that all of us together create god, that god is not man's ancestor, but his descendant. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Alas for him who seeks salvation in good only! Balanced on God's strong shoulders, Good and Evil flap together like two mighty wings and lift him high. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

As I watched the seagulls, I thought, That's the road to take; find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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

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! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

My route, Sior Francis - and don't be surprised when you hear it - my route when I set out to find God... was... laziness. Yes, laziness. If I wasn't lazy I would have gone the way of respectable, upstanding people. Like everyone else I would have studied a trade - cabinet-maker, weaver, mason - and opened a shop; I would have worked all day long, and where then would I have found time to search for God? I might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack: that's what I would have said to myself. All my mind and thoughts would have been occupied with how to earn my living, feed my children, how to keep the upper hand over my wife. With such worries, curse them, how could I have the time, or inclination, or the pure heart needed to think about the Almighty?

But by the grace of God I was born lazy. To work, get married, have children, and make problems for myself were all too much trouble. I simply sat in the sun during winter and in the shade during summer, while at night, stretched out on my back on the roof of my house, I watched the moon and the stars. And when you watch the moon and the stars how can you expect your mind not to dwell on God? I couldn't sleep any more. Who made all that? I asked myself. And why? Who made me, and why? Where can I find God so that I may ask Him? Piety requires laziness, you know. It requires leisure - and don't listen to what others say. The laborer who lives from hand to mouth returns home each night exhausted and famished. He a ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

You, too, have a devil inside you but you still don't know his name and because you don't know his name, you suffocate. Baptize him, Boss, and you'll find relief. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

God is action, complete with mistakes, fumblings, persistence, agony. God is not the power that has found eternal equilibrium, but the power that is forever breaking every equilibrium, forever searching for a higher one. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

God changes appearances every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises. One moment he is a glass of fresh water, the next, your son bouncing on your knees or an enchanting woman, or perhaps merely a morning walk. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

- 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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

How the hell was she going to fight them?
With style. She could almost hear Niko's voice. She grinned, despite herself. Do try not to die, won't you? That was Tyler. It would have been followed by a delicate yawn. And Oz: Keep your head down and don't be stupid. Lise: Bitch, do not even think about leaving me alone with all this testosterone. Giselle: You can't win if you die, so suck it up. Tutresiel: Princess, you aren't even trying if you're dying.
And Alexander: Come home. ~ Diana Pharaoh Francis

The sole way to save oneself is to save others. Or to struggle to save others -even that is sufficient. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

No wide road leads to God. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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! - The Narrator. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

It's possible to save oneself from Satan, Father Francis, but from men - never! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

This book was not written because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death - because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered. Christ suffered pain, and since then pain has been sanctified. Temptation fought until the very last moment to lead him astray, and Temptation was defeated. Christ died on the Cross, and at that instant death was vanquished forever. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I knew that no matter what door you knock on in a Cretan village, it will be opened for you. A meal will be served in your honor, and you will sleep between the best sheets in the house. In Crete, the stranger is still the unknown god. Before him, all doors and all hearts are opened. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Lord, bend me, or I shall rot.
Lord do not bend me too much, for I shall break.
Lord bend me too much, who cares if I break! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Once more there sounded within me the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

This look said I was uncomfortably near some line. Nikos had a lot of lines, all hidden. If you shot a marble in on one side of his personality, instead of coming out the other it would bounce on secret internal walls and shoot out in some unpredictable way. I suspected some of those ways were deadly. ~ Mary Hughes

Sea, autumnal sweetness, islands bathed in light, diaphanous cloak of delicate rainfall clothing Greece's eternal bareness. "Happy the person," I thought, "who is deemed worthy, before dying, to sail the Aegean." This world offers many pleasures: women, fruit, ideas. But I think no pleasure exists that plunges a person's heart into Paradise more than the joy of cutting across this sea on a gentle autumn day, murmuring the name of each island. Nowhere else are you transported from truth to dream with such serenity and ease. Boundaries fade; the mast of even the most dilapidated ship sprouts buds and grapes. Here in Greece, truly, necessity blossoms most certainly into miracle.

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek (p. 23). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Throughout my life my greatest benefactors have been my dreams and my travels; very few men, living or dead, have helped me in my struggle. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

there are three kinds of men: those who make it their aim, as they say, to live their lives, eat, drink, make love, grow rich, and famous; then come those who make it their aim not to live their own lives but to concern themselves with the lives of all men – they feel that all men are one and they try to enlighten them, to love them as much as they can and do good to them; finally there are those who aim at living the life of the entire universe – everything, men, animals, trees, stars, we are all one, we are all one substance involved in the same terrible struggle. What struggle?…Turning matter into spirit. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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

The Purpose gives the array of these actions coherence, not just at any given moment, but over time, and thus helps ensure that the firm does achieve a genuine specialization, a genuine difference from its competitors. In this way it makes superior profits possible. Purpose ~ Nikos Mourkogiannis

Lions and Lambs, love and force, light and fire, good and evil: all things climb the same mountain, the mountain of God. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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

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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me.

A rabbi was once asked the following question: 'When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?' The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, 'No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!'

Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl…

For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

What, then is our duty? It is to carefully distinguish the historic moment in which we live and to consciously assign our small energies to a specific battlefield. The more we are in phase with the current which leads the way, the more we aid man in his difficult, uncertain, danger-fraught ascent toward salvation. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Monarch of earth, I shall confess my secret craft: I've always fought to purify wild flame to light, and kindle whatever light I found to burst in flame. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Before me is the abyss. How can I leap across it? And if I do not leap, how shall I ever be able to reach God? ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Our body is a ship that sails on deep blue waters. What is our goal? To be shipwrecked! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Two equally steep and bold paths may lead to the same peak. To act as if death did not exist, or to act thinking every minute of death, is perhaps the same thing. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

As far as I can see, your lordship's never been hungry, never killed, never stolen. what ever can you know of the world? You've got an innocent's brain and you skin's never felt the sun, ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

When I encounter a sunrise, a painting, a woman, or an idea that makes my heart bound like a young calf, then I know I am standing in front of happiness. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

If you have faith, a splinter from an old door will become a holy relic. And if you have no faith the entire holy cross will become an old door. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Within this arena, which grows more stable night after day, generations work and love and hope and vanish. New generations tread on the corpses of their fathers, continue the work above the abyss and struggle to tame the dread mystery. How? By cultivating a single field, by kissing a woman, by studying a stone, an animal, an idea. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

A prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. You'll ask me why. It's because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Who knows, perhaps God is simply the search for God. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

God sends rain, but He also sends hoods; and when the rain grows heavier, He sends a cave. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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

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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

The canary began to sing again. The sun had struck it, and its throat and tiny breast had filled with song. Francis gazed at it for a long time, not speaking, his mouth hanging half opened, his eyes dimmed with tears.
"The canary is like man's soul," he whispered finally. "It sees bars round it, but instead if despairing, it sings. It sings, and wait and see, Brother Leo: one day its song shall break the bars. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I said only one word, brought only one message: Love. Love - nothing else. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Life's true face is the skull. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Once more I realized to what an extent earthly happiness is made to the measure of man. It is not a rare bird which we must pursue at one moment in heaven, at the next in our minds. Happiness is a domestic bird found in our own courtyards. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

What sort of madness comes over us to make us throw ourselves on another man, when he's done nothing to us, and bite him, cut his nose off, tear his ear out, run him through the guts - and all the time, calling on the Almighty to help us! Does it mean we want the Almighty to go and cut off noses and ears and rip people up? ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all ... is not to have one. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission - his life. ...

Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded - Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer - everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book - it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."

But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...

The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...

The library, almost alone of the g ~ Archibald MacLeish

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

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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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

There's a devil inside me which cries, "You're not the son of the Carpenter, you're the son of King David! You are not a man, you are the Son of man whom Daniel prophesied." And still more: "The Son of God! And still more: God! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

What is love?
It's not empathy, nor kindness.
Empathy takes two, the one who hurts and the one who empathizes.
Kindness takes two, the one who gives and the one who takes.
But love takes just one.
The two get together into one.
They don't separate.
The "I" and the "you" disappear.
I LOVE MEANS I DISAPPEAR.. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strength to tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom. I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist, a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down; it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees. Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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

Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover its meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I felt sorry for the inhabitants and went into the forest to admonish the wolf in God's name not to eat any more sheep. I called him, he came - and do you know what his answer was? 'Francis, Francis,' he said, 'do not destroy God's prescribed order. The sheep feeds on grass, the wolf on sheep - that's the way God ordained it. Do not ask why; simply obey God's will and leave me free to enter the sheepfolds whenever I feel the pinch of hunger. I say my prayers just like Your Holiness. I say: "Our Father who reignest in the forests and hast commanded me to eat meat, Thy will be done. Give me this day my daily sheep so that my stomach may be filled, and I shall glorify Thy name. Great art Thou, Lord, who hast created mutton so delicious. And when the day cometh that I shall die, Grant, Lord, that I may be resurrected, and that with me may be resurrected all the sheep I have eaten - so that I may eat them again!"' That, Brother Leo, is what the wolf answered me. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

If the soul within us does not change, Judas, the world outside us will never change. The enemy is within, the Romans are within, salvation starts from within! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I felt this was my duty ... to draw the thick ancestral darkness out of my loins and transform it ... into light. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

A crust of lard, habit, and cowardice envelops the soul; no matter what it craves from the depths of its prison, the lard, habit, and cowardice carry out something entirely different. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

At night the jackals came and ate their feet, and the next morning crows flew down and ate their eyes. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

We are small worms, Zorba, very small worms on the tiniest leaf of a gigantic tree. This tiny leaf is our earth; the other leaves are the stars you see moving at night. We drag ourselves along on our tiny leaf, eagerly ferreting around in it. We smell it: it has an odor. We taste it: it can be eaten. We strike it: it resounds, shouting like a living thing. Some of us human beings, the most fearless, reach the edge of the leaf. We bend over this edge with open eyes and ears, observing chaos below. We shudder. We divine the terrible drop beneath us, occasionally hear a sound made by the gigantic tree's other leaves, sense the sap rising from the roots, swelling our hearts. In this way, leaning over the abyss, we realize with all our body and soul that we are being overcome by terror. What begins at that moment is - " I stopped. I had wanted to say, "What begins at that moment is poetry," but Zorba would not have understood, so I kept silent. "What begins?" asked Zorba eagerly. "Why did you stop?" "At that moment, Zorba, begins the great danger," I replied. "Some become dazed and delirious; others, growing afraid, take great pains to discover an answer that will brace their heart. These say, 'God.' Still others, calmly, bravely, look down at the drop from the leaf's edge and say, 'I like it.' ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Only one woman exists in this world, one woman with countless faces. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I'm fighting to save myself, and save myself, I will. Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation of Christ ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I knew that over and above the truth, there exists another duty which is much more important and much more human. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

If some priest or other comes to take my confession and give me sacrament, tell him to clear out, quick, and leave me his curse instead! I´ve done heaps and heaps of things in my life, but I still did not do enough. Men like me ought to live a thousand years. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I was ill before I fell ill. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

We gaze with perplexity at the highest part of the spiral of force that governs the Universe. And we call it God. We could give it any other name: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Total Light, Matter, Spirit, Supreme Hope, Supreme Despair, Silence.

"But we call it God, because only this name – for some mysterious reason – is capable of making our heart tremble with vigor.

"And let there be no doubt that this trembling is absolutely indispensable for us to be in contact with the basic emotions of the human being, emotions that are always beyond any explanation or logic. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

When shall I at last retire into solitude alone, without companions, without joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream? When, in my rags - without desires - shall I retire contented into the mountains? When, seeing that my body is merely sickness and crime, age and death, shall I - free, fearless, and blissful - retire to the forest? When? When, oh when? ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Happy the youth who believes that his duty is to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with his own heart. Woe to whoever commences his life without lunacy. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

At such times [drunk] all the doors of a woman's being are opened. The sentinels relax and a kind word is as powerful as gold or love. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

My life had got on the wrong track, and my contact with men had become now a mere soliloquy. I had fallen so low that, if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Forgetting himself for a moment, Francis brought his hand out from under his frock in order to bless the multitude. When the people saw his wound they bellowed madly. The women dashed forward with mantles outstretched to catch the drops; the men thrust in their hands and anointed their faces with blood. The villagers' expressions grew savage, and so did their souls. They longed to be able to tear the Saint limb from limb in order for each of them to claim a mouthful of his flesh, for they wanted to make him their own, to have him enter them so that they could become one with a saint - could be sanctified. Blind rage had overpowered them; their eyes were leaden, their lips ringed with froth. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Sometimes what we desire the most can change who we are, and it's up to us to decide if that's for better or worse. You must learn to control those desires so that you're always on the right path, even if that means never attaining or holding on to the thing you want most." Niko's ~ Dannika Dark

In this way, without understanding how, I entered sleep together with Christ's passion and the nightingales' warbling, just as the soul will enter Paradise. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Are you a preacher or a capitalist? You must make up your mind!"
But how could I choose? I was consumed by the ingenuous desire of uniting these two things, of finding a synthesis in which the irreducible opposites would fraternise, and of winning both the earthly life and the kingdom of the skies. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Die every day. Be reborn again every day. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

O Sun, great Oriental, my proud mind's golden cap, I love to wear you cocked askew, to play and burst in song throughout our lives, and so rejoice our hearts. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Reach what you cannot ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

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

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

Is he good? Or is he bad? That's the only thing I ask nowadays. And as I grow older - I'd swear this on the last crust I eat - I feel I shan't even go on asking that! Whether a man's good or bad, I'm sorry for him, for all of 'em. The sight of a man just rends my insides, even if I act as though I don't care a damn! There he is, poor devil, I think, he also eats and drinks and makes love and is frightened, whoever he is: he has his God and his devil just the same, and he'll peg out and lie as stiff as a board beneath the ground and be food for worms, just the same. Poor devil! We're all brothers! All worm-meat! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis