6 Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes on Mystery

Nikos Kazantzakis quotes on mystery

26. I surrender myself to everything. I love, I feel pain, I struggle. The world seems to me wider than the mind, my heart a dark and almighty mystery.

55. Behind the stream of my mind and body, behind the stream of my race and all mankind, behind the stream of plants and animals, I watch with trembling the Invisible, treading on all visible things and ascending. Behind his heavy and blood-splattered feet I hear all living things being trampled on and crushed. His face is without laughter, dark and silent, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond hope.

63. God confronts me with terror and love - for I am His only hope - and says: 'This Ecstatic, who gives birth to all things, who rejoices in them all and yet destroys them, this Ecstatic is my Son!'

66. Amid all these things, beyond all these things every man and nation, every plant and animal, every god and demon, charges upward like an army inflamed by an incomprehensible, unconquerable Spirit. We struggle to make this Spirit visible, to give it a face, to encase it in words, in allegories and thoughts and incantations, that it may not escape us. But it cannot be contained in the twentysix letters of an alphabet which we string out in rows; we know that all these words, these allegories, these thoughts, and these incantations are, once more, but a new mask with which to conceal the Abyss.

68. 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.

103. A woman's body is a dark and monstrous mystery; between her supple thighs a heavy whirlpool swirls, two rivers crash, and woe to him who slips and falls!