Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes

Life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.

Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.

Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

You can and you must expect suffering.

It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion.

My father always used to say, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," - 'til the accident.

To be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Discipline is something we despise for the moment.... We all look for a place to run, an excuse with which to stall. No one enjoys it. Yet those of us who have endured it know that the fruit it produces and the pain from which it ultimately spares us makes it worth the agony.

Life was brutal and it made victims of everyone.’ (Nykyrian)

The person who can dominate during rough times is the person who can dominate, period.

My mother always said that the strongest steel is forged by the fires of hell.

Ours is a kind of struggle designed, I dare say, by Providence to try the patience, fortitude, and virtue of men. None, therefore, who is engaged in it, will suffer himself, I trust, to sink under difficulties, or be discouraged by hardships. If he cannot do as he wishes, he must do what he can.

Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.

He who cannot endure the bad will not live to see the good.

Strength and struggle travel together.

You're never given more pain than you can handle. You never, ever get more than you can take.

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.

Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.

I can bear scorpion's stings, tread fields of fire, in frozen gulfs of cold eternal lie, be tossed aloft through tracts of endless void, but cannot live in shame.

When you think life is tough, it can get a lot tougher.

The rice grain suffers under the blow of the pestle. But admire its whiteness once the order is over. So it is with men and the world we live in. To be a man one must suffer the blows of misfortune.

The heart must be beaten or bruised, and then the sweet scent will come out.

I've become a pretty tough cookie after having a divorce. I think that I've persevered through a lot of talk.