Nikos Kazantzakis

My 'Report to Greco' is not an autobiography.

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

Let your youth have free reign. It won't come again, so be bold, and no repenting.

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.

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

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.

The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

What a miracle life is and how alike are all souls when they send their roots down deep and meet and are one!

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

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.

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

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

The masses do not see the Sirens. They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them... and royally squander their lives with her.

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.

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

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

In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through.

Every man is half God, half man; he is both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: It is universal.

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

We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.