- I WILL NOT accept boundaries; appearances cannot contain me; I choke! To bleed in this agony, and to live it profoundly, is the second duty.
- The mind is patient and adjusts itself, it likes to play; but the heart grows savage and will not condescend to play; it stifles and rushes to tear apart the nets of necessity.
- What is the value of subduing the earth, the waters, the air, of conquering space and time, of understanding what laws govern the mirages that rise from the burning deserts of the mind, their appearance and reappearance?
- I have one longing only: to grasp what is hidden behind appearances, to ferret out that mystery which brings me to birth and then kills me, to discover if behind the visible and unceasing stream of the world an invisible and immutable presence is hiding.
- If the mind cannot, if it was not made to attempt the heroic and desperate breach beyond frontiers, then if only the heart could!
- Beyond! Beyond! Beyond! Beyond man I seek the invisible whip which strikes him and drives him into the struggle. I lie in ambush to find out what primordial face struggles beyond animals to imprint itself on the fleeting flesh by creating, smashing, and remolding innumerable masks. I struggle to make out beyond plants the first stumbling steps of the Invisible in the mud.
- A command rings out within me: "Dig! What do you see?" "Men and birds, water and stones." "Dig deeper! What do you see?" "Ideas and dreams, fantasies and lightening flashes!" "Dig deeper! What do you see?" "I see nothing! A mute Night, as thick as death. It must be death." "Dig deeper!" "Ah! I cannot penetrate the dark partition! I hear voices and weeping. I hear the flutter of wings on the other shore." "Don't weep! Don't weep! They are not on the other shore. The voices, the weeping, and the wings are your own heart."
- Beyond the mind, on the edge of the heart's holy precipice, I proceed, trembling. One foot grips the secure soil, the other gropes in the darkness above the abyss.
- Behind all appearances, I divine a struggling essence. I want to merge with it.
- I feel that behind appearances this struggling essence is also striving to merge with my heart. But the body stands between us and separates us. The mind stands between us and separates us.
–Nikos Kazantzakis, from “The Saviors of God”