I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of using one's senses and intellect in appreciating and creating art.
Nikos Kazantzakis reflects on the profound connection between our senses and our intellectual capabilities in the process of artistic creation and appreciation. By 'collecting his tools,' he suggests that one must be fully aware and engaged with their surroundings, as well as harnessing their mental faculties, to truly experience and understand the depth of life and art, especially when contrasting the darkness of night as a backdrop for this journey.
In practice
This quote can be used to inspire artists during an art showcase to connect deeply with their work.
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?
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.
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.
I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.
I needed my life as a springboard for my fiction. I have to have something solid under my feet when I write. I'm not a fantasist. I bounce up and down on the diving board, and I go into the water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout.
Animation is the one type of movie that really does play for the entire audience. Our challenge is to make stories that connect for kids and adults.
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
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