The Last Temptation of Christ

When everyone drowns and I'm the only one to escape, God is protecting me. When everyone else is saved and I'm the only one to drown, God is protecting me then too.

Truly, everything in this world depended on time. Time ripened all. If you had time, you succeeded in working the human mud internally and turning it into spirit. Then you did not fear death. If you did not have time, you perished.

If I were fire, I would burn; if I were a woodcutter, I would strike. But I am a heart, and I love.

Only one woman exists in this world, one woman with countless faces.

My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.

I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else! I say: cross, death, kingdom of heaven, God...and what do you understand? Each of you attaches his own suffering, interests and desires to each of these sacred words, and my words disappear, my soul is lost. I can't stand it any longer!

We are not men, to have need of another, an eternal life; we are women, and for us one moment with man we love is everlasting Paradise, one moment far from the man we love is everlasting hell. It is here on earth that we women love out eternity

What is truth? What is falsehood? Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts up a man's height above the earth - that's true. Whatever clips off man's wings - that's false.

Life on earth means: the sprouting of wings.

Never in my life have I feared death as much as I feared that resurrection.

A prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. You’ll ask me why. It’s because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.

If the soul within us does not change, Judas, the world outside us will never change. The enemy is within, the Romans are within, salvation starts from within!

The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.

The more he approached the people and perceived their anger-filled eyes and the dark, tortured fierceness of their expressions, the more his heart stirred, the more his bowels flooded with deep sympathy and love. These are the people, he reflected. They are all brothers, every one of them, but they do not know it—and that is why they suffer. If they knew it, what celebrations there would be, what hugging and kissing, what happiness!

Love’s feet are always pleased to step on ashes.

An old fisherman heard all this and shook his head. “This is what happens to those who don’t get married,” he said. “All they want to do is save the world, by hook or by crook. The sperm rises to their heads and attacks their brains. For God’s sake, all of you: get married, let your forces loose on women and have children in order to calm yourselves!

They had no fear of death, and whoever has no fear of death—the centurion had often meditated on this here in the East—whoever has no fear of death is immortal.

God replies every time we question him, but our flesh is bemired and almost deaf: we do not hear.

Take care, Friars!” he cried. “If the yearning is broken off for even an instant, the wings become chains again. Stay vigilant, fight, keep the torch of your soul burning day and night. Strike! Forge the wings! I’m going-I am in a hurry to speak to God. I’m going… These are my final words: Strike! Forge the wings!

Man cannot sprout wings unless he has first reached the brink of the abyss!

There, in the desert, there’s hunger, thirst, prostrations—and God. Here there’s food, wine, women—and God. Everywhere God. So, why go look for him in the desert?

He’s dead.” “His deliverance has come,” said someone else. “The two friends have parted and returned to their homes,” a third person whispered, “the flesh to the soil and the soul to God.

Good Lord, just think what poor old God must go through also,” he said with a laugh. “He certainly got himself in hot water when he created the world. The fish screams, Don’t blind me, Lord; don’t let me enter the nets! The fisherman screams, Blind the fish, Lord; make him enter the nets! Which one is God supposed to listen to? Sometimes he listens to the fish, sometimes to the fisherman—and that’s the way the world goes round!