Words matter. These are the best Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
What a miracle life is and how alike are all souls when they send their roots down deep and meet and are one!
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 is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.
Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.
The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
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.
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 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.
In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.
In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through.
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.
God hates a half-devil ten times more than an arch-devil!
Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to unfasten your belt and look for a fight.
Let your youth have free reign. It won’t come again, so be bold, and no repenting.
A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humour, and others, I’m told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men.
I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
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.
When everything goes wrong, what a joy to test your soul and see if it has endurance and courage. An invisible and all-powerful enemy – some call him God, others the Devil, seem to rush upon us to destroy us; but we are not destroyed.
We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.
My principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, has been the incessant merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.
Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.
