Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes

I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

The theater is necessary. Dance is necessary. Song is necessary. The arts are necessary- they are a necessary part of our lives

Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.

I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false

The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.

I think of art as a glue, a cultural and social glue. It's one of the means that has served to show us the things we believe in and the things we celebrate; it has served to reinforce our relationship to each other.

In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

Poetry should only occupy the idle.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author wouold heave preferred to paint rather than to wirte; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money.

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think.

Bement was a very good teacher but he was a very poor painter. I guess he wasn't a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.