Nikos Kazantzakis - Heart Quotes

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I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.

Nikos Kazantzakis
Enlighten the dark blood of your ancestors, shape their cries into speech, purify their will, widen their narrow, unmerciful brows. This is your second duty.
For you are not only a slave. As soon as you were born, a new possibility was born with you, a free heartbeat stormed through the great sunless heart of your race.

Nikos Kazantzakis
You are not a miserable and momentary body; behind your fleeting mask of clay, a thousand-year-old face lies in ambush. Your passions and your thoughts are older than your heart or brain.

Nikos Kazantzakis
It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth. It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart.
Your dead do not lie in the ground. They have become birds, trees, air. You sit under their shade, you are nourished by their flesh, you inhale their breathing. They have become ideas and passions, they determine your will and your actions.
Future generations do not move far from you in an uncertain time. They live, desire, and act in your loins and your heart.
In this lightning moment when you walk the earth, your first duty, by enlarging your ego, is to live through the endless march, both visible and invisible, of your own being.

Nikos Kazantzakis
Which of the two eternal roads shall I choose? Suddenly I know that my whole life hangs on this decision — the life of the entire Universe.
Of the two, I choose the ascending path. Why? For no intelligible reason, without any certainty; I know how ineffectual the mind and all the small certainties of man can be in this moment of crisis.
I choose the ascending path because my heart drives me toward it. "Upward! Upward! Upward!" my heart shouts, and I follow it trustingly.

Nikos Kazantzakis
Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling and shouting within you.
It is your duty every moment, day and night, in joy or in sorrow, amid all daily necessities, to discern this Cry with vehemence or restraint, according to your nature, with laughter or with weeping, in action or in thought, striving to find out who is imperiled and cries out.
And how we may all be mobilized together to free him.

Nikos Kazantzakis
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
Descend you weary-laden, descend in the dark earth,
help me to finish swiftly my dread master's shroud,
let each hem hold my pain, each corner hide a crow,
a lean, voracious crow to peck his heart out bit by bit.

Nikos Kazantzakis
High up where the poor sat, the people quaked with fear:
they saw the soul stretched on the ground, a votive beast
beaten by the conflicting powers of light and dark,
and their minds shook, nor knew now what great god to choose,
for comfort's road dropped to the right, the rough ascent
rose to the left, and both roads seemed to lead to God,
while at the crossroads stood the human heart, and swayed.

Nikos Kazantzakis
When I encounter a sunrise, a painting, a woman, or an idea that makes my heart bound like a young calf, then I know I am standing in front of happiness.

Nikos Kazantzakis
How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea.... All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.

Nikos Kazantzakis
I will not accept boundaries; appearances cannot contain me; I choke! To bleed in this agony, and to live it profoundly, is the second duty.
The mind is patient and adjusts itself, it likes to play; but the heart grows savage and will not condescend to play; it stifles and rushes to tear apart the nets of necessity.

Nikos Kazantzakis
Cries rise up on every side. Who shouts? It is we who shout — the living, the dead, and the unborn. But at once we are crushed by fear, and we fall silent.
And then we forget — out of laziness, out of habit, out of cowardice. But suddenly the Cry tears at our entrails once more, like an eagle.
For the Cry is not outside us, it does not come from a great distance that we may escape it. It sits in the center of our hearts, and cries out.
God shouts: "Burn your houses! I am coming! Whoever has a house cannot receive me!
"Burn your ideas, smash your thoughts! Whoever has found the solution cannot find me."

Nikos Kazantzakis
Gather together in your heart all terrors, recompose all details. Salvation is a circle; close it!
Fourth Step : The Earth

Nikos Kazantzakis
I put my body through its paces like a war horse; I keep it lean, sturdy, prepared. I harden it and I pity it. I have no other steed.
I keep my brain wide awake, lucid, unmerciful. I unleash it to battle relentlessly so that, all light, it may devour the darkness of the flesh. I have no other workshop where I may transform darkness into light.
I keep my heart flaming, courageous, restless. I feel in my heart all commotions and all contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life. But I struggle to subdue them to a rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher than that of my heart — to the ascending rhythm of the Universe.

Nikos Kazantzakis
This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.

Nikos Kazantzakis
Pain is not the only essence of our God, nor is hope in a future life or a life on this earth, neither joy nor victory. Every religion that holds up to worship one of these primordial aspects of God narrows our hearts and our minds.
The essence of our God is STRUGGLE. Pain, joy, and hope unfold and labor within this struggle, world without end.

Nikos Kazantzakis
To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise.

Nikos Kazantzakis
I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear.

Nikos Kazantzakis
The moment is ripe: leave the heart and the mind behind you, go forward, take the third step.
Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena. Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things.
Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all: Hope. This is the third duty.

Nikos Kazantzakis
We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers. We have named this circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence.
But we have named it God because only this name, for primordial reasons, can stir our hearts profoundly. And this deeply felt emotion is indispensable if we are to touch, body with body, the dread essence beyond logic.
Within this gigantic circle of divinity we are in duty bound to separate and perceive clearly the small, burning arc of our epoch.

Nikos Kazantzakis
The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love.

Nikos Kazantzakis
Even the most humble insect and the most insignificant idea are the military encampments of God. Within them, all of God is arranged in fighting position for a critical battle.
Even in the most meaningless particle of earth and sky I hear God crying out: "Help me!"
Everything is an egg in which God's sperm labors without rest, ceaselessly. Innumerable forces within and without it range themselves to defend it.
With the light of the brain, with the flame of the heart, I besiege every cell where God is jailed, seeking, trying, hammering to open a gate in the fortress of matter, to create a gap through which God may issue in heroic attack.

Nikos Kazantzakis
This is our epoch, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor — we did not choose it. This is our epoch, the air we breathe, the mud given us, the bread, the fire, the spirit!
Let us accept Necessity courageously. It is our lot to have fallen on fighting times. Let us tighten our belts, let us arm our hearts, our minds, and our bodies. Let us take our place in battle!

Nikos Kazantzakis
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
Having seen that I was not capable of using all my resources in political action, I returned to my literary activity. There lay the the battlefield suited to my temperament. I wanted to make my novels the extension of my own father's struggle for liberty. But gradually, as I kept deepening my responsibility as a writer, the human problem came to overshadow political and social questions. All the political, social, and economic improvements, all the technical progress cannot have any regenerating significance, so long as our inner life remains as it is at present. The more the intelligence unveils and violates the secrets of Nature, the more the danger increases and the heart shrinks.

Nikos Kazantzakis
I surrender myself to everything. I love, I feel pain, I struggle. The world seems to me wider than the mind, my heart a dark and almighty mystery.

Nikos Kazantzakis
Death's dry bones glowed with light in the erotic dark
but he woke not nor felt the two warm bodies merge;
the male worm then took heart and in his wife's ear whispered:
"With one sweet kiss, dear wife, we've conquered conquering Death!"

Nikos Kazantzakis
Behind all appearances, I divine a struggling essence. I want to merge with it.
I feel that behind appearances this struggling essence is also striving to merge with my heart. But the body stands between us and separates us. The mind stands between us and separates us.

Nikos Kazantzakis