True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.
Be sure to live up to your reputation for honesty and goodness, because many souls who believe you to be honest and good have placed themselves in your hands.
Inexperience loves to preach.
Monarch of earth, I shall confess my secret craft: I’ve always fought to purify wild flame to light, and kindle whatever light I found to burst in flame.
All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows.
Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.
When an almond tree became covered with blossoms in the heart of winter, all the trees around it began to jeer. ‘What vanity,’ they screamed, ‘what insolence! Just think, it believes it can bring spring in this way!’ The flowers of the almond tree blushed for shame. ‘Forgive me, my sisters,’ said the tree. ‘I swear I did not want to blossom, but suddenly I felt a warm springtime breeze in my heart.
When shall I at last retire into solitude alone, without companions, without joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream? When, in my rags – without desires – shall I retire contented into the mountains? When, seeing that my body is merely sickness and crime, age and death, shall I – free, fearless, and blissful – retire to the forest? When? When, oh when?
A prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. You’ll ask me why. It’s because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.
An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave – I was quite all right on this Cretan coast, and felt happy and free there and I needed nothing – but because I have always been consumed with one desire; to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die.
What a miracle life is and how alike are all souls when they send their roots down deep and meet and are one!
No. I don’t believe in anything. How many times must I tell you that? I don’t believe in anything anyone; only in Zorba. Not because Zorba is better than the others; not at all, not a little bit! He’s a brute like the rest! But I believe in Zorba because he’s the only being I have in my power, the only one I know. All the rest are guts. All the rest are ghosts, I tell you. When I die, everything’ll die. The whole Zorbatic world will go to the bottom!
It is impossible for me to remember how many days or weeks went by in this way. Time is round, and it rolls quickly.
The longer I live, the more I rebel. I’m not going to give in; I want to conquer the world!
Who knows, perhaps God is simply the search for God.
What is love? It is not simply compassion, not simply kindness. In compassion there are two: the one who suffers and the one who feels compassion. In kindness there are two: the one who gives and the one who receives. But in love there is only one; the two join, unite, become inseparable. The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ vanish. To love means to lose oneself in the beloved.
Madness, Brother Masseo, is the salt which prevents good sense from rotting.
My life had got on the wrong track, and my contact with men had become now a mere soliloquy. I had fallen so low that, if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book.
Man cannot sprout wings unless he has first reached the brink of the abyss!
I pity the village where no one is a saint, but I also pity the village where everyone is a saint!