Top 200 Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Man cannot sprout wings unless he has first reached the brink of the abyss!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

103. “We are not men, to have need of another, an eternal life; we are women, and for us one moment with man we love is everlasting Paradise, one moment far from the man we love is everlasting hell. It is here on earth that we women love out eternity.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

104. “Every obstacle in his journey became a milestone, an occasion for further triumph. We have a model in front of us now, a model who blazes our trail and gives us strength.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

105. “All my life I struggled to stretch my mind to the breaking point, until it began to creak, in order to create a great thought which might be able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and to console mankind.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

106. “My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

107. “Be sure to live up to your reputation for honesty and goodness, because many souls who believe you to be honest and good have placed themselves in your hands.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

108. “Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all, in my view, is not to have one.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

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

— Nikos Kazantzakis

110. “I was ill before I fell ill.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

111. “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.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

112. “I am not going to kill sin by killing the sinners; I am not going to wage war against evildoers and infidels. I shall preach love, and I shall love; I shall preach concord, and shall practice brotherly love toward everyone in the world.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

113. “Beauty always had a purpose: to be of service to life.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

114. “What a miracle life is and how alike are all souls when they send their roots down deep and meet and are one!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

115. “No. I don’t believe in anything. How many times must I tell you that? I don’t believe in anything anyone; only in Zorba. Not because Zorba is better than the others; not at all, not a little bit! He’s a brute like the rest! But I believe in Zorba because he’s the only being I have in my power, the only one I know. All the rest are guts. All the rest are ghosts, I tell you. When I die, everything’ll die. The whole Zorbatic world will go to the bottom!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

116. “What is love? It is not simply compassion, not simply kindness. In compassion there are two: the one who suffers and the one who feels compassion. In kindness there are two: the one who gives and the one who receives. But in love there is only one; the two join, unite, become inseparable. The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ vanish. To love means to lose oneself in the beloved.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

117. “Good Lord, how can the rich bear to die?”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

118. “What is the definition of heaven? Complete happiness. But how can anyone be completely happy when he looks out from heaven and sees his brothers and sisters being punished in hell? How can paradise exist if the inferno exists also? That is why I say – and let this sink deep down into your minds, my sisters – that either we shall all be saved, all of us together, or else we shall all be damned. If a person is killed at the other end of the earth, we are killed; if a person is saved, we are saved.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

119. “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

120. “I’m alone and am suffocating because I’m unable to give voice to my emotions.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

121. “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

122. “Life is trouble. Death – no. To live – do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

123. “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

124. “The right path is the ascent.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

125. “Throughout my life my greatest benefactors have been my travels and my dreams. Very few men, living or dead, have helped me in my struggles.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

126. “Oh, yes. Wife. Children. Home. Everything. The full catastrophe.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

127. “You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord’s service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

128. “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

129. “I would fill my soul with flesh, my flesh with soul.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

130. “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

131. “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

132. “As long as our souls remain strong, that is all that matters; as long as they don’t decline. Because with the fall of certain souls in this world, the world itself will collapse. These are the pillars which support it. They are few, but enough.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

133. “Madness, Brother Masseo, is the salt which prevents good sense from rotting.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

134. “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

135. “They had no fear of death, and whoever has no fear of death – the centurion had often meditated on this here in the East – whoever has no fear of death is immortal.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

136. “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

137. “Truly, everything in this world depended on time. Time ripened all. If you had time, you succeeded in working the human mud internally and turning it into spirit. Then you did not fear death. If you did not have time, you perished.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

138. “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

139. “On the way between nothingness and God, we dance and weep.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

140. “Zorba sees everything everyday as if for the first time.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

141. “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

142. “Keep your distance, boss! Don’t make men too bold, don’t go telling them we’re equal, we’ve got the same rights, or they’ll go straight and trample on your rights; they’ll steal your bread and leave you to die of hunger. Keep your distance, boss, by all the good things I wish you!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

143. “Who knows, perhaps God is simply the search for God.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

144. “With the world in the state it is today, whoever is virtuous must be so to the point of sainthood, and even beyond; whoever is a sinner must be so to the point of bestiality and even beyond. Today the middle road is no more.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

145. “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

146. “Time is not a field, to be measured in rods, nor a sea, to be measured in miles; it is a heart beat.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

147. “Whoever climbed the Lord’s mountain had to possess clean hands and an innocent heart; otherwise the Summit would kill him. Today the doorway is deserted. Soiled hands and sinful hearts are able to pass by without fear, for the Summit kills no longer.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

148. “It doesn’t matter whether or not you have a head, you must wear the right sort of hat.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

149. “Leave your books alone. Aren’t you ashamed? Man is a wild beast, and wild beasts don’t read.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

150. “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