Quote

How simple and frugal a thing is happiness.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nikos Kazantzakis
Age: 74 †
Born: 1883
Born: February 18
Died: 1957
Died: October 26
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Heraclion
Nicos Kazantzakes
Thing
Crete
Chestnuts
Frugal
Sea
Happiness
Simple

More quotes by Nikos Kazantzakis

Image
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
Image
God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
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.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
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.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else! I say: cross, death, kingdom of heaven, God...and what do you understand? Each of you attaches his own suffering, interests and desires to each of these sacred words, and my words disappear, my soul is lost. I can't stand it any longer!
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
Today, any action anywhere on earth has an immediate repercussion on all five continents. News of a victory of the Eastern armies in Morocco or Shanghai travels instantly, thanks to modern means of communication, to all Eastern peoples and fills them with enthusiasm and faith. This phenomenon is, of course, unprecedented in the history of man.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
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.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
We are not men, to have need of another, an eternal life we are women, and for us one moment with man we love is everlasting Paradise, one moment far from the man we love is everlasting hell. It is here on earth that we women love out eternity
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Be always restless, unsatisfied, unconforming. Whenever a habit becomes convenient, smash it! The greatest sin of all is satisfaction.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
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
Image
By believing passionately in that which doesn't exist, you create it and that which has not been sufficiently desired is what we call the non existent.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
I've stopped thinking all the time of what happened yesterday. And stopped asking what's going to happen tomorrow. What's happening today, this minute, is what I care about.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
Truly, everything in this world depended on time. Time ripened all. If you had time, you succeeded in working the human mud internally and turning it into spirit. Then you did not fear death. If you did not have time, you perished.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
How does the light of a star set out and plunge into black eternity in its immortal course? The star dies, but the light never dies such also is the cry of freedom.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
The canary is like a man's soul. It sees bars around it, but instead of despairing, it sings.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
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
Image
The major and almost only theme of all my work is the struggle of man with God: the unyielding, inextinguishable struggle of the naked worm called man against the terrifying power and darkness of the forces within him and around him.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Image
A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
Nikos Kazantzakis