Nikos Kazantzakis: Man
Nikos Kazantzakis was Greek writer. Explore interesting quotes on man.“If you are a man of learning, fight in the skull, kill ideas and create new ones.”
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: If you are a man of learning, fight in the skull, kill ideas and create new ones. God hides in every idea as in every cell of flesh. Smash the idea, set him free! Give him another, a more spacious idea in which to dwell.
Source: Zorba the Greek (1946), Ch. 23
“Free yourself from race also; fight to live through the whole struggle of man.”
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: It is not you talking. Nor is it your race only which shouts within you, for all the innumerable races of mankind shout and rush within you: white, yellow, black.
Free yourself from race also; fight to live through the whole struggle of man.
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: How can you reach the womb of the Abyss to make it fruitful? This cannot be expressed, cannot be narrowed into words, cannot be subjected to laws; every man is completely free and has his own special liberation.
No form of instruction exists, no Savior exists to open up the road. No road exists to be opened.
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: Every man has his own circle composed of trees, animals, men, ideas, and he is in duty bound to save this circle. He, and no one else. If he does not save it, he cannot be saved.
These are the labors each man is given and is in duty bound to complete before he dies. He may not otherwise be saved. For his own soul is scattered and enslaved in these things about him, in trees, in animals, in men, in ideas, and it is his own soul he saves by completing these labors.
“Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all … is not to have one.”
Variant: Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all, in my view, is not to have one.
Source: Zorba the Greek
Source: The Last Temptation of Christ
Source: The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), Ch. 10
The Last Temptation of Christ (1951)
Context: This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles — to set out for the lofty peak which Christ, the first-born sone of salvation, attained. How can we begin?
If we are to follow him we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, we must relive his anguish: his victory over the blossoming snares of the earth, his sacrifice of the great and small joys of men and his ascent from sacrifice to sacrifice, exploit to exploit, to martyrdom's summit, the Cross.
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: I do not care what face other ages and other people have given to the enormous, faceless essence. They have crammed it with human virtues, with rewards and punishments, with certain ties. They have given a face to their hopes and fears, they have submitted their anarchy to a rhythm, they have found a higher justification by which to live and labor. They have fulfilled their duty.
But today we have gone beyond these needs; we have shattered this particular mask of the Abyss; our God no longer fits under the old features.
Our hearts have overbrimmed with new agonies, with new luster and silence. The mystery has grown savage, and God has grown greater. The dark powers ascend, for they have also grown greater, and the entire human island quakes.
Let us stoop down to our hearts and confront the Abyss valiantly. Let us try to mold once more, with our flesh and blood, the new, contemporary face of God.
For our God is not an abstract thought, a logical necessity, a high and harmonious structure made of deductions and speculations.
He is not an immaculate, neutral, odorless, distilled product of our brains, neither male nor female.
He is both man and woman, mortal and immortal, dung and spirit. He gives birth, fecundates, slaughters — death and eros in one — and then he begets and slays once more, dancing spaciously beyond the boundaries of a logic which cannot contain the antinomies.
The Last Temptation of Christ (1951)
“Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single outcry.”
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling and shouting within you.
It is your duty every moment, day and night, in joy or in sorrow, amid all daily necessities, to discern this Cry with vehemence or restraint, according to your nature, with laughter or with weeping, in action or in thought, striving to find out who is imperiled and cries out.
And how we may all be mobilized together to free him.
“Every man worthy of being called a son of man bears his cross and mounts his Golgotha.”
Author's Introduction, p. 15
Report to Greco (1965)
Context: Every man worthy of being called a son of man bears his cross and mounts his Golgotha. Many, indeed most, reach the first or second step, collapse pantingly in the middle of the journey, and do not attain the summit of Golgotha, in other words the summit of their duty: to be crucified, resurrected, and to save theirs souls. Afraid of crucifixion, they grow fainthearted; they do not know that the cross is the only path to resurrection. There is no other path.
“Paradise is here, my good man. God, give me no other paradise!”
Freedom and Death (1956)
Context: God, what is all this talk put out by the popes? Paradise is here, my good man. God, give me no other paradise!
Voice of the Nile, from Odysseus' story, Book VIII, line 1290
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)
Context: Blessed are those eyes that have seen more water than any man!
Blessed be that haughty mind that aimed at the greatest hope!
May you be blessed who row the current your life long
and now with dry unfreshened lips descend to Hades
to find the hidden deathless springs and slake your thirst!
My son, it's death who keeps and pours the deathless waters.
“The major and almost only theme of all my work is the struggle of man with "God"”
As quoted in Nikos Kazantzakis (1968) by Helen Kazantzakis, p. 507
Context: The major and almost only theme of all my work is the struggle of man with "God": the unyielding, inextinguishable struggle of the naked worm called "man" against the terrifying power and darkness of the forces within him and around him.
“Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.”
Source: Zorba the Greek