My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry.
Interpretation
This quote expresses that the artist's work is deeply connected to their inner emotions and struggles.
Nikos Kazantzakis reflects on the profound relationship between an artist's soul and their creative output. He suggests that every piece of work is not just a product of skill but an emotional expression that seeks to articulate the cry of the artist's innermost feelings, serving as a commentary on their experiences and the world around them.
In practice
This quote would be perfect for an art exhibition to illustrate the emotional depth of the works displayed.
A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.
This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.
What happiness this is: to fly, skimming over the earth just as we do in our dreams! Life has become a dream. Can this be the meaning of paradise?
I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen.
The dual substance of Christ - the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God. [...] has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. [...] My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. [...] And my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability.
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.
There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.
When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.
And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, and silently steal away.
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.