8 Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes on Creativity

Nikos Kazantzakis quotes on creativity

7. All my life I struggled to stretch my mind to the breaking point, until it began to creak, in order to create a great thought which might be able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and to console mankind.

12. A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.

13. We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide ... both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

101. O Sun, great Oriental, my proud mind's golden cap, I love to wear you cocked askew, to play and burst in song throughout our lives, and so rejoice our hearts.

115. But we, O blockhead, with dogged spite and armored love shall force those deaf dark powers to grow ears and hear us! I know that God is earless, eyeless, and heartless too, a brainless Dragon Worm that crawls on earth and hopes in anguish and then in secret that we'll give him soul, for then he, too, may sprout ears, eyes, to match his growth, but God is clay in my ten fingers, and I mould him!

132. In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.

141. 'Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality,' says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.

142. I thank God that this refreshing childhood vision still lives inside me in all its fullness of color and sound. This is what keeps my mind untouched by wastage, keeps it from withering and running dry. It is the sacred drop of immortal water which prevents me from dying. When I wish to speak of the sea, woman, or God in my writing, I gaze down in my breast and listen carefully to what the child within me says. He dictates to me; and if it sometimes happens that I come close to these great forces of the sea, woman, and God, approach them by means of words and depict them, I owe it to the child who still lives within me. I become a child again to enable myself to view the world always for the first time, with virgin eyes.