All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven't the time to write, and all those who have the time don't live them! D'you see?
Interpretation
Life's true mysteries are best experienced rather than documented, as those who deeply live them are too engaged to write about them.
In this quote, Nikos Kazantzakis highlights the paradox of life where those who truly understand and embody the complexities and wonders of existence are often too busy living in the moment to put those experiences into words. Conversely, those who might have the time to reflect and write about life often lack the depth of experience needed to convey its mysteries fully. This suggests a tension between experiential knowledge and intellectual contemplation.
In practice
During a commencement speech to emphasize the importance of experience over mere academic achievement.
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.
This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.
What happiness this is: to fly, skimming over the earth just as we do in our dreams! Life has become a dream. Can this be the meaning of paradise?
I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen.
The dual substance of Christ - the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God. [...] has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. [...] My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. [...] And my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability.
Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.
Sincerity is an openness of heart; we find it in very few people; what we usually see is only an artful dissimulation to win the confidence of others.
In my travels I have found that those who keep Heaven in view remain serene and cheerful in the darkest day. If the glories of Heaven were more real to us, if we lived less for material things and more for things eternal and spiritual, we would be less easily disturbed by this present life.
Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.
We think the way we do partly because Socrates thought the way he did. His basic idea - that the unexamined life is not worth living - is what it means to live in the modern world, to develop ideas and ask questions.
I want to be there for all those who are left behind in this world, whether it's because they are born poor, born a woman, or born in an area affected by devastation.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.