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" The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation... God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The spirit desires to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear. "

Nikos Kazantzakis

God

Struggle

" My 'Report to Greco' is not an autobiography. "

Nikos Kazantzakis

Autobiography

Report

" 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. "

" Happiness is a simple everyday miracle, like water, and we are not aware of it. "

Nikos Kazantzakis

Water

Simple

" My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry. "

" I felt deep within me that 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! "

" 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. "

" A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free. "

" May God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons - and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them; they run off - and how will you ever get control of them again! "

" Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite. "

" A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death. "

" Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive. "

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

" God hates a half-devil ten times more than an arch-devil! "

" 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. "

" 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 humour, and others, I'm told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men. "

" I knew that no matter what door you knock on in a Cretan village, it will be opened for you. A meal will be served in your honor, and you will sleep between the best sheets in the house. In Crete, the stranger is still the unknown god. Before him, all doors and all hearts are opened. "

" Throughout my life my greatest benefactors have been my dreams and my travels; very few men, living or dead, have helped me in my struggle. "

" The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. "

" In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can. "

" The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness. "

" One of man's greatest obligations is anger. "

" I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability. "

" Life is a crusade in the service of God. Whether we wished to or not, we set out as crusaders to free - not the Holy Sepulcher - but that God buried in matter and in our souls. "

" Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels. "

" Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality. "

" My principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, has been the incessant merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. "

" I said to the almond tree, 'Friend, speak to me of God,' and the almond tree blossomed. "

Nikos Kazantzakis

Friend

God

" Everything in this world has a hidden meaning. "

" Nothing is nearer to us than heaven. The earth is beneath our feet, and we tread upon it, but heaven is within us. "