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!
Interpretation
The quote reflects a struggle between the love for life and the distractions of written words.
In this quote, Nikos Kazantzakis expresses a profound conflict between his deep appreciation for the vibrancy of life and the time spent immersed in the trivialities of literature and mundane writings. It highlights how one can become ensnared by the written word, neglecting the richness of real-life experiences, suggesting that sometimes our intellectual pursuits can lead us away from fully engaging with the world around us.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about how reading can sometimes distract us from real-world experiences.
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.
Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.
Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were bloodstained - if you ate animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.
To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.
…not a fighter… an adventurer. He doesn’t attack, he engages; He doesn’t defend, he expands; He doesn’t destroy, he transforms; He doesn’t reject, he explores; ….
The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of thingsstop being a glass. Become a lake.
I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings.
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