Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba the Greek (1946)

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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
"Life is trouble," Zorba continued. "Death, no. To live — do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!"

Nikos Kazantzakis
To think things out properly and fairly, a fellow's got to be calm and old and toothless: When you're an old gaffer with no teeth, it's easy to say: 'Damn it, boys, you mustn't bite!' But, when you've got all thirty-two teeth...

Nikos Kazantzakis
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.

Nikos Kazantzakis
I should learn to run, to wrestle, to swim, to ride horses, to row, to drive a car, to fire a rifle. I should fill my soul with flesh. I should fill my flesh with soul. In fact, I should reconcile at last within me the two internal antagonists.

Nikos Kazantzakis
The highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!

Nikos Kazantzakis
Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.

Nikos Kazantzakis
What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.

Nikos Kazantzakis
I prepared excitedly for my departure, as if this journey had a mysterious significance. I had decided to change my mode of life. "'til now," I told myself, "you have only seen the shadow and been well content with it; now, I am going to lead you into the substance."

Nikos Kazantzakis
Two equally steep and bold paths may lead to the same peak. To act as if death did not exist, or to act thinking every minute of death, is perhaps the same thing.

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
Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all … is not to have one.

Nikos Kazantzakis
There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces.

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
God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises.

Nikos Kazantzakis
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
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
Every village has its simpleton, and if one does not exist they invent one to pass the time.

Nikos Kazantzakis
As I watched the seagulls, I thought: "That's the road to take; find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust."

Nikos Kazantzakis
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
While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it we do suddenly realize — sometimes with astonishment — how happy we had been.

Nikos Kazantzakis
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
I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.

Nikos Kazantzakis
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
When everything goes wrong, what a joy to test your soul and see if it has endurance and courage! An invisible and all-powerful enemy—some call him God, others the Devil, seem to rush upon us to destroy us; but we are not destroyed.

Nikos Kazantzakis