“By believing passionately in something that does not yet exist, we create it.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

Last update June 13, 2021. History

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Nikos Kazantzakis 222

Greek writer 1883–1957

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“By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Attributed to Kafka in Ambiguous Spaces (2008) by NaJa & deOstos (Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos), p. 7, and a couple other publications since, this is actually from Report to Greco (1965) by Nikos Kazantzakis, p. 434
Misattributed

“I heard the bells from the future churches, the children playing and laughing in the schoolyards … and here was an almond tree in bloom before me: I must reach out and cut a flowering branch. For, by believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired, whatever we have not irrigated with our blood to such a degree that it becomes strong enough to stride across the somber threshold of nonexistence.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Report to Greco

Source: Report to Greco (1965), p. 434; in a few publications since 2008 part of this has been misattributed to Franz Kafka: "By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."

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Yanni in Words. Miramax Books. Co-author David Rensin

“We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.”

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“The false logic involved is: “We exist; therefore something—call it X—created us.””

Arthur C. Clarke book Crusade

Once this assumption is made, the properties of the hypothetical X can be fantasied in an unlimited number of ways.
But the entire process is obviously fallacious; for by the same logic something must have created X—and so on. We are immediately involved in an infinite regress, which can have no meaning in the real universe.

Crusade, p. 878
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)