Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes

I did spend a lot of time as a child very confused about whether I had a devil in me, or whether I was in a state of grace. I mean, these ideas are so potent to anybody with half an imagination.

You know what else that settles then tonight. This hue and cry and controversy that has been spawned by the devil to try and bring dissention within the body of Christ that we are gods. I am a little god.

You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, "Solitude, solitude." And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, "Leave all things and follow me," and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation?

I lost the love of heaven above I spurned the lust of earth below I felt the sweets of fancied love And hell itself my only foe.

Because if I let myself feel the pain and the anger, I think it might kill me. Or I might kill someone else. I know it's wrong to feel that way about God and I know its's wrong to not feel anything. I hate it. I don't hate God. I hate not loving Him.

How can one love the light and live in darkness?

There was the torture of sermons, and that not a slight one, for I was very fond of them.

As sure as this Earth is turnin, souls burnin / In search of higher learnin, turnin in every direction seeking direction / My moms cryin cause her insides are dyin / Her son tryin her patience, keep her heart racin / A million beats a minute, I know I push you to your limit / But it's this game, love—I'm caught up all in it / They make it so you can't prevent it, never give it / You gotta take it, can't fake it, I keep it authentic

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

You are a child of God. He is father of your spirit. Spiritually you are of noble birth, the offspring of the King of Heaven. Fix that truth in your mind and hold to it. However many generations in your mortal ancestry, no matter what race or people you represent, the pedigree of your spirit can be written on a single line. You are a child of God!

Ever at Thy glowing altar Must my heart grow sick and falter, Wishing He I served were black.

Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.

For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self YOU have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted : And I no longer want this false self. But now, Father, I come to You in your own Son's self ... and it is He Who Presents me to You.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd be either a lunatic on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking

I remember feeling, 'If you do not leave now, you won't leave with your soul intact.'

If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

In a sense we're all children of God - Jesus is called the one and only Son. Monogeneo is the word, God's only "genetic" child. He bears the very essence of God. What we say about God we say about Jesus. So the promise rises and falls on the identity of Jesus.

Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.

You may have orthodox heads, and yet you may have the devil in your hearts.

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance?

I don't think sexual repression leads to violence, but I can see the situation where you're trying very hard to be very religious and to be good but pornography exerts a strong force on you, and one way to get further away from it would be to immerse yourself in a strong religious system.

Now I just don't know who to tell to go to hell Who put the old devil in the distorted angel?