Top 200 Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I pity the village where no one is a saint, but I also pity the village where everyone is a saint!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

152. “Death had entered my life with a familiar and well-loved face, like a friend come to call for you and who waits patiently in a corner until you have finished your work.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

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

— Nikos Kazantzakis

154. “God, what is all this talk put out by the popes? Paradise is here, my good man. God, give me no other paradise!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

155. “It is impossible for me to remember how many days or weeks went by in this way. Time is round, and it rolls quickly.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

156. “An old fisherman heard all this and shook his head. “This is what happens to those who don’t get married,” he said. “All they want to do is save the world, by hook or by crook. The sperm rises to their heads and attacks their brains. For God’s sake, all of you: get married, let your forces loose on women and have children in order to calm yourselves!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

157. “Love’s feet are always pleased to step on ashes.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

158. “An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave – I was quite all right on this Cretan coast, and felt happy and free there and I needed nothing – but because I have always been consumed with one desire; to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

159. “O brain, be flowers that nightingales may come to sing!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

160. “This distance between my dreams and my capabilities makes me so furious that I want to die–to die from spite and also from grief.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

161. “There, in the desert, there’s hunger, thirst, prostrations – and God. Here there’s food, wine, women – and God. Everywhere God. So, why go look for him in the desert?”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

162. “In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

163. “Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the longer the tether of our slavery?”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

164. “If they were to ask me what road leads to heaven, I would answer them: the most difficult!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

165. “God replies every time we question him, but our flesh is bemired and almost deaf: we do not hear.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

166. “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

167. “Every one follows his own bent. Man is like a tree. You’ve never quarrelled with a fig tree because it doesn’t bear cherries, have you?”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

168. “There is only one essence, always the same. As yet, man has found no other means to elevate himself – none but the routing of matter and the submission of the individual to an end which transcends the individual, even though that end be chimerical. When the heart believes and loves, nothing chimerical exists; nothing exists but.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

169. “Good Lord, just think what poor old God must go through also,” he said with a laugh. “He certainly got himself in hot water when he created the world. The fish screams, Don’t blind me, Lord; don’t let me enter the nets! The fisherman screams, Blind the fish, Lord; make him enter the nets! Which one is God supposed to listen to? Sometimes he listens to the fish, sometimes to the fisherman – and that’s the way the world goes round!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

170. “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

171. “But how can anyone put a bridle on man’s vanity and arrogance? But how can Purity walk the earth without covering her feet with mud?”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

172. “The longer I live, the more I rebel. I’m not going to give in; I want to conquer the world!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

173. “You’ve got a devil inside you, as well, but you don’t know his name yet, and, since you don’t know that, you can’t breathe. Baptise him, boss, and you’ll feel better!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

174. “And I am glad, because although no one else in the world remembers him now, he will live inside me as long as I live. We shall die together. This grandfather was the first to make me wish not to die – so that the dead within me should not die. Since then, many departed dead ones have sunk, not into the grave, but into my memory, and I know now that as long as I live they shall live too.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

175. “Our body is a ship that sails on deep blue waters. What is our goal? To be shipwrecked!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

176. “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

177. “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

178. “Thy designs are a bottomless pit. How can I descend into this pit to examine it? Thou lookest thousands of years into the future and then Thou judgest. What today seems an injustice to man’s minute brain becomes, thousands of years hence, the mother of man’s salvation. If what today we term injustice did not exist, perhaps true justice would never come to mankind.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

179. “Because what God wants, that, and only that, is also what we want – but we don’t know it. God comes and awakens our souls, revealing to them their real, though unknown, desire. This is the secret, Brother Leo. To do the will of God means to do my own most deeply hidden will.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

180. “The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

181. “At night the jackals came and ate their feet, and the next morning crows flew down and ate their eyes.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

182. “Free your self from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But isn’t that, too, a form of slavery?”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

183. “Each man must have his own special route to lead him to God.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

184. “It’s possible to save oneself from Satan, Father Francis, but from men – never!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

185. “My heart is always heavy. No matter where I go, I have no pleasure. I’m hiding. Everything that I do, write and think strikes me as unworthy. And human beings are horrible, ignoble companions. I often think, furthermore, that the only thing worthy of our lofty nature is death.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

186. “To do the will of God means to do my own most deeply hidden will. Within even the most unworthy of men there is a servant of God, asleep.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

187. “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

188. “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

189. “The higher we went the more our spirits seemed to become purged and exalted. Once again I felt the influence on the soul of pure air, easy breathing and a vast horizon. Anyone would think the soul, too, was an animal with lungs and nostrils, and that it needed oxygen, was stifled in the dust or in the midst of too much stale breath.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

190. “Man is a brute,′ he said, striking the pebbles with his stick. ‘A great brute. Your lordship doesn’t realise this. It seems everything’s been easy for you, but you ask me! A brute, I tell you! If you’re cruel to him, he respects and fears you. If you’re kind to him, he plucks your eyes out.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

191. “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

192. “I am always filled with melancholy. It’s as if I see everything black. Everything wounds me deeply.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

193. “I realized that meals, too, are a spiritual service and that meat, bread, and wine are the raw materials from which spirit is formed.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

194. “Was this man the Messiah whom God had promised him or wasn’t he? All the miracles he performed could also be performed by Satan, who could even resurrect the dead. The miracles therefore did not give the rabbi sufficient basis to pass judgment; nor did the prophecies. Satan was a sly and exceedingly powerful archangel. In order to deceive mankind he was capable of making his words and actions fit the holy prophecies to perfection.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

195. “Good god how much I have suffered, but serenely, because I understood that what I endured was nothing, just a caress compared to the world’s boundless misfortune.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

196. “She was touched and began to open her heart to me. It was like opening an old chest, full of spices, yellowed love-letters and ancient dresses.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

197. “We sense happiness with difficulty while experiencing it. Only when it has passed and we look back do we suddenly comprehend, sometimes with astonishment, how happy we have been. I, however, on this Cretan shore, was experiencing happiness while being simultaneously aware of my happiness.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

198. “I am not yet a complete person. I am struggling to conquer my weakness. I am good at finding what is right, at enflaming various souls, at lighting up various minds. But I am unable, on my own, to come in contact with people, to battle against indifference, ridicule or even small talk.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

199. “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 humor, and others, I’m told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men. I’m not one of the worst, boss, nor yet one of the best. I’m somewhere in between the two. What I eat I turn into work and good humor. That’s not too bad, after all!”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

200. “You should also know that a true woman is more pleased by the pleasure she gives to a man than by the pleasure she takes from him.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis