402 Quotes by 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.

You gave me your curse, holy Fathers. I give you a blessing: May you be as moral and religious as I am.

The major and almost only theme of all my work is the struggle of man with "God": the unyielding, inextinguishable struggle of the naked worm called "man" against the terrifying power and darkness of the forces within him and around him.

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.

Thus night with all her snares passed through the upper world and baited all heads sweetly, fed all foolish hopes, for night can bring to men all shrewish day denies, wrapped as a gift in the green leaves of opiate dream.

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.

Fools, art is a heavy task, more heavy than gold crowns; it's far more difficult to match firm words than armies, they're disciplined troops, unconquered, to be placed in rhythm, the mind's most mighty foe, and not disperse in air. I'd give, believe me, a whole land for one good song, for I know well that only words, that words alone, like the high mountains, have no fear of age or death.

I heard the bells from the future churches, the children playing and laughing in the schoolyards ... and here was an almond tree in bloom before me: I must reach out and cut a flowering branch. For, by believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired, whatever we have not irrigated with our blood to such a degree that it becomes strong enough to stride across the somber threshold of nonexistence.

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.