Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakiswas a Greek writer, celebrated for his novels, which include Zorba the Greek, Christ Recrucified, Captain Michalis, and The Last Temptation of Christ. He also wrote plays, travel books, memoirs and philosophical essays such as The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises...
NationalityGreek
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 February 1883
CityHeraklion, Greece
heart men sea
To cleave that sea [the Aegean] 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.
simple sea chestnuts
How simple and frugal a thing is happiness.
country eye sea
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.
men sea dying
Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.
golf rhythm seagull
As I watched the seagulls, I thought, That's the road to take; find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust.
expect fear
I expect nothing. I fear no one. I am free.
speak tree
I said to the almond tree, ''Friend, speak to me of God,'' and the almond tree blossomed.
death reborn dies
Die every day. Be reborn again every day.
dark ends abyss
We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.
bears rich lord
Good Lord, how can the rich bear to die?
life military war
What, then is our duty? It is to carefully distinguish the historic moment in which we live and to consciously assign our small energies to a specific battlefield. The more we are in phase with the current which leads the way, the more we aid man in his difficult, uncertain, danger-fraught ascent toward salvation.
games giving gold
May he be cursed on earth who gives his trust to virtue, that bankrupt crone who takes our life's pure gold and gives but bad receipts for payment in the lower world. Ah, passers-by that stroll, travelers that come and go, all that I had, I placed on virtue, and lost the game!
boys thinking two
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...
book long paper
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!