Zorba The Greek - Quotations

Quotations

• The meaning of the words, art, love, beauty, purity, passion, all this was made clear to me by the simplest of human words uttered by this workman.
• We must both have been hungry because we constantly led the conversation round to food.

"What is your favorite dish, grandad?"

"All of them, my son. It's a great sin to say this is good and that is bad."

"Why? Can't we make a choice?"

"No, of course we can't."

"Why not?"

"Because there are people who are hungry." I was silent, ashamed. My heart had never been able to reach that height of nobility and compassion.

• The aim of man and matter is to create joy, according to Zorba – others would say ‘to create spirit,’ but that comes to the same thing on another plane. But why? With what object? And when the body dissolves, does anything at all remain of what we have called the soul? Or does nothing remain, and does our unquenchable desire for immortality spring, not from the fact that we are immortal, but from the fact that during the short span of our life we are in the service of something immortal?
• "the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!"
• I felt once more how simple a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else. And all that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.