Nikos Lygeros Quotes

#1. 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. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#2. Sea, autumnal sweetness, islands bathed in light, diaphanous cloak of delicate rainfall clothing Greece's eternal bareness. "Happy the person," I thought, "who is deemed worthy, before dying, to sail the Aegean." This world offers many pleasures: women, fruit, ideas. But I think no pleasure exists that plunges a person's heart into Paradise more than the joy of cutting across this sea on a gentle autumn day, murmuring the name of each island. Nowhere else are you transported from truth to dream with such serenity and ease. Boundaries fade; the mast of even the most dilapidated ship sprouts buds and grapes. Here in Greece, truly, necessity blossoms most certainly into miracle.

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek (p. 23). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

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

#4. Fools, art is a heavy task, more heavy than gold crowns; it's far more difficult to match firm words than armies, they're disciplined troops, unconquered, to be placed in rhythm, the mind's most mighty foe, and not disperse in air. I'd give, believe me, a whole land for one good song, for I know well that only words, that words alone, like the high mountains, have no fear of age or death. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#5. There is no harsher means of punishment, than to answer malice with kindness. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#6. With the passage of days in this godly isolation [desert], my heart grew calm. It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain. Everything - where we came from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth - struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation. Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm. Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm. I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar, and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk. When God's wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#7. Leave nothing for death but a burned-out castle #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#8. Only after I've seen the visible can I imagine what the invisible is. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#9. Man hurries, God does not. That is why man's works are uncertain and maimed, while God's are flawless and sure. My eyes welling with tears, I vowed never to transgress this eternal law again. Like a tree I would be blasted by wind, struck by sun and rain, and would wait with confidence; the long-desired hour of flowering and fruit would come. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#10. Love responsibility. Say: It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#11. 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. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#12. 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. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#13. God hates a half-devil ten times more than an arch-devil! #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#14. We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#15. No. I don't believe in anything. How many times must I tell you that? I don't believe in anything anyone; only in Zorba. Not because Zorba is better than the others; not at all, not a little bit! He's a brute like the rest! But I believe in Zorba because he's the only being I have in my power, the only one I know. All the rest are guts. All the rest are ghosts, I tell you. When I die, everything'll die. The whole Zorbatic world will go to the bottom! #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#16. God enjoys himself, kills, commits injustice, makes love, works, likes impossible things, just the same as I do.

But, boss, I´ve said so before, and I say it again, God and the devil are one and the same thing! #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#17. The Lord preserve us from sainthood #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#18. Reach what you cannot #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#19. 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. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#20. Love's feet are always pleased to step on ashes. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#21. When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me.

A rabbi was once asked the following question: 'When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?' The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, 'No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!'

Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl…

For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#22. As you walk, you cut open and create that riverbed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#23. The people cast themselves down by the fuming boards
while servants cut the roast, mixed jars of wine and water,
and all the gods flew past like the night-breaths of spring.
The chattering female flocks sat down by farther tables,
their fresh prismatic garments gleaming in the moon
as though a crowd of haughty peacocks played in moonlight.
The queen's throne softly spread with white furs of fox
gaped desolate and bare, for Penelope felt ashamed
to come before her guests after so much murder.
Though all the guests were ravenous, they still refrained,
turning their eyes upon their silent watchful lord
till he should spill wine in libation for the Immortals.
The king then filled a brimming cup, stood up and raised
it high till in the moon the embossed adornments gleamed:
Athena, dwarfed and slender, wrought in purest gold,
pursued around the cup with double-pointed spear
dark lowering herds of angry gods and hairy demons;
she smiled and the sad tenderness of her lean face,
and her embittered fearless glance, seemed almost human.
Star-eyed Odysseus raised Athena's goblet high
and greeted all, but spoke in a beclouded mood:
"In all my wandering voyages and torturous strife,
the earth, the seas, the winds fought me with frenzied rage;
I was in danger often, both through joy and grief,
of losing priceless goodness, man's most worthy face.
I raised my arms to #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#24. 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. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#25. I would fill my soul with flesh, my flesh with soul #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#26. 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. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#27. God sends rain, but He also sends hoods; and when the rain grows heavier, He sends a cave. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#28. Every one follows his own bent. Man is like a tree. You've never quarrelled with a fig tree because it doesn't bear cherries, have you? #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#29. As long as there are flowers and children and birds in the world, have no fears: everything will be fine. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#30. This look said I was uncomfortably near some line. Nikos had a lot of lines, all hidden. If you shot a marble in on one side of his personality, instead of coming out the other it would bounce on secret internal walls and shoot out in some unpredictable way. I suspected some of those ways were deadly. #Quote by Mary Hughes

#31. I'm going to make a jug, I'm going to make a plate, I'm going to make a lamp and the devil knows what more! That's what
you might call being a man: freedom!"
"Well?" I asked. "What about your finger?"
Oh, it got in my way in the wheel. It always got plumb in the middle of things and upset my plans.
So one day I seized a hatchet ... #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#32. I was once more struck by the truth of the ancient saying: Man's heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#33. Everything in this world has a hidden meaning. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#34. I lived six months with her. Since that day - God be my witness! - 1 need fear nothing.
Nothing, I say. Nothing, except one thing: that the devil, or God, wipe out those six
months from my memory. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#35. An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave - I was quite all right on this Cretan coast, and felt happy and free there and I needed nothing - but because I have always been consumed with one desire; to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#36. Ah, if you could dance all that you've just said, then I'd understand. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#37. What first truly stirred my soul was not fear or pain, nor was it pleasure or games; it was the yearning for freedom. I had to gain freedom - but from what, from whom? Little by little, in the course of time, I mounted freedom's rough unaccommodating ascent. To gain freedom first of all from the Turk, that was the initial step; after that, later, this new struggle began: to gain freedom from the inner Turk - from ignorance, malice and envy, from fear and laziness, from dazzling false ideas; and finally from idols, all of them, even the most revered and beloved. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#38. Within this arena, which grows more stable night after day, generations work and love and hope and vanish. New generations tread on the corpses of their fathers, continue the work above the abyss and struggle to tame the dread mystery. How? By cultivating a single field, by kissing a woman, by studying a stone, an animal, an idea. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#39. I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free . #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

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

#41. The bishop escorted Francis a short distance out into the courtyard. Bending over, he said to him in a hushed voice, "careful Francis. You're overdoing it."
"That's how one finds God, Bishop." Francis answered.
The bishop shook his head. "Even virtue needs moderation; otherwise it can become arrogance."
"Man stands within the bounds of moderation; God stands outside them. I am heading for God, Bishop." said Francis, and he proceeded hastily towards the street door. He had no time to lose. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#42. You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord's service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis

#43. 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. #Quote by Nikos Kazantzakis