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)

Lower those sable eyes regarding me,Lower them, my jewel; they are flogging me. (Report to Greco)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)