Nikos Kazantzakis

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!

The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet.

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

Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.

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

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

I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.

I was happy, I knew that. 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 realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.

Discipline is the highest of all virtues. Only so may strength and desire be counterbalanced and the endeavors of man bear fruit.

My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.

Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.

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.