Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes on Reality
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By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
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With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say: All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind. The sun comes up and the sun goes down in my skull. Out of one of my temples the sun rises, and into the other the sun sets. The stars shine in my brain; ideas, men, animals browse in my temporal head; songs and weeping fill the twisted shells of my ears and storm the air for a moment.
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'I do not know whether behind appearances there lives and moves a secret essence superior to me. Nor do I ask; I do not care. I create phenomena in swarms, and paint with a full palette a gigantic and gaudy curtain before the abyss. Do not say, 'Draw the curtain that I may see the painting.' The curtain is the painting.
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All this world, all this rich, endless flow of appearances is not a deception, a multicolored phantasmagoria of our mirroring mind. Nor is it absolute reality which lives and evolves freely, independent of our mind's power. It is not the resplendent robe which arrays the mystic body of God. Nor the obscurely translucent partition between man and mystery. All this world that we see, hear, and touch is that accessible to the human senses, a condensation of the two enormous powers of the Universe permeated with all of God.
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Thus night with all her snares passed through the upper world and baited all heads sweetly, fed all foolish hopes, for night can bring to men all shrewish day denies, wrapped as a gift in the green leaves of opiate dream.
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Speak straight and clear! I only hear that manly prayer which like a huge fist breaks my head against the stones.
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'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.