We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.
Interpretation
Life is a brief experience between two voids, emphasizing its transient beauty.
Nikos Kazantzakis' quote reflects on the nature of existence, suggesting that life is a fleeting moment of brightness amidst the darkness of before and after. It invites a contemplation of life as a precious, luminous interval that deserves appreciation in contrast to the inevitability of life's end and the origins that remain shrouded in mystery.
In practice
In a motivational speech about appreciating the moment, this quote can inspire the audience to cherish their 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.
Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters actions which reveal the character in the play.
And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.
How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms
The recipe for beauty is to have less illusion and more Soul, to retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in the body into the unchanging calm and glorious freedom of spiritual harmony.
Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.
Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.
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