Are you a fan of Instagram and want all your pictures to have a meaningful quote or caption? And are you also coming to Crete? Then you’re just in the right place at the right time! Check this collection of brilliant quotes and captions about Crete for those beautiful pictures of the island.

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Check the following famous (and not so famous) captions that perfectly describe the nature of Cretans and all the nuances and traits of Crete, Greece’s most beautiful island

• At first blush, Crete seems stuck in time. Change comes slowly to the island. But it does come, as sure as the winter waves that undulate on its rocky shores; as sure as the seasons that nurture the island culture.
  Melanie Crane, Uniquely Crete, Life redefined on a Greek island.

• One cannot help wondering what would have happened to Crete without Venizelos. Would other Cretan leaders have fought so persistently for unity and, if Venizelos has not become prime minister, would Greece have won the Balkan Wars and would Crete have been included in the Treaty of London?
  Diana Conyers, Uncaptured Crete.

• Crete has always been a theatre for strange and splendid events.
  George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner.

• Lausanne might have confirmed the expulsion of enemies from our motherland, but it sunk all of us island Turks into mourning at the thought of being torn from our roots. How could we be expected to leave our homes, our Crete?
  Ahmet Yorulmaz, Children of War.

• There’s no such thing as a Cretan race. Crete has always been cosmopolitan.
  Rackham & Moody, The Making of the Cretan Landscape.

• The Cretans’ more natural attitudes toward sex would also have had other consequences equally difficult to perceive under the prevailing paradigm, wherein religious dogma often views sex as more sinful than violence. As Hawkes writes, ‘The Cretans seem to have reduced and diverted their aggressiveness through a free and well-balanced sexual life.’
  Along with their enthusiasm for sports and dancing and their creativity and love of life, these liberated attitudes toward sex seem to have contributed to the generally peaceful and harmonious spirit predominant in Cretan life.
  Riane Eisler.

• For all we know that English people are
  Fed upon beef – I won’t say much of beer
  Because ’tis liquor only, and being far
  From this my subject has no business here;
  We know too, they are very fond of war,
  A pleasure – like all pleasures – rather dear;
  So were the Cretans – from which I infer
  That beef and battle both were owing her.
  Lord Byron.

• The majority of our polities, as Aristotle says, are like the Cyclops, abandoning the guidance of the women and children to each individual man according to his mad and injudicious ideas: hardly any, except the polities of Sparta and of Crete, have entrusted the education of children to their laws.
  Michel De Montaigne.

• I knew that no matter what door you knock on in a Cretan village, it will be opened for you. A meal will be served in your honor, and you will sleep between the best sheets in the house. In Crete, the stranger is still the unknown god. Before him, all doors and all hearts are opened.
  Nikos Kazantzakis.

• I have heard it claimed that Chania is the most beautiful city in Crete, even in Greece. These are quite some claims to make, but that anyone would consider making them should tell us something about the town. It is effortlessly sublime.
  Richard Clark, Crete, A Notebook.

• In Old Europe and Ancient Crete, women were respected for their roles in the discovery of agriculture and for inventing the arts of weaving and pottery making.
  Carol P. Christ.

• The carved images on the early Minoan sealstones are tantalizing, inscrutable. The Nature Goddess is yanked from the soil like a snake or a sheaf of barley; the Mistress of the Animals suckles goats and gazelles. There are male Adorants certainly – up on tiptoe, their outstretched arms hoisted in a kind of heil, their bodies arched suggestively, pelvis forward, before the Goddess – but there are no masculine deities, not a single one in sight. No woman worth her salt, one might think, could fail to be intrigued.
  Alison Fell.

• Love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul’s enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosant of the molds when they are unable to contain you any longer – these are the great cries of Crete.
  Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco.

• Although it could not be more Greek, Crete is really a country within a country, with its own history, folklore, and traditions.
  Dorling Kindersley, Crete Eyewitness Travel Top 10.

• One might be excused for seeking the attempt at writing a general history of Crete as a somewhat hazardous enterprise 
  Theocharis Detorakis, History of Crete.

• All Cretans are liars.  
  Epimenides.

• Crete has been a martyr island. It had thousands of years of changeful history before the Christian era, and, making allowance for a few centuries of peace and prosperity, it may fairly be said to have had a thousand years of struggle and suffering in Christian times.
  John Freese, A Short Popular History of Crete.

• In spite of, or perhaps because of, the repeated invasions and the harshness of the landscape, Cretans have developed a unique character, which has manifested itself throughout the years. First of all, they nurture a fierce patriotism and love their island (…)
  Chris Moorey, A History of Crete.

• On two things every traveller and historian is agreed: the bravery of the people and the beauty of the island. 
  Michael Llewellyn Smith, The Great Island.

• I suppose, coming to it cold, Sitia at first appears unprepossessing, but viewed from the sea or looking downwards from the hills it seems to own its place, self-contained and at ease, stretching out along the shore and back into the foothills of the mountains inland.
  Richard Clark, Crete, A Notebook.

• My favourite place to write is at my desk in my house in the mountains of Crete. I produce more there because one big distraction is missing: the Internet.
  Neal Asher.

• When she drew back the curtains she was greeted by the dazzling vista of a sparkling sea and the island of Spinalonga, which, in the shimmering haze of heat, seemed further away, more remote than it had yesterday.
  Victoria Hislop, The Island.

• I felt once more how simple and frugal thing happiness is: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.
  Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek.

• (…) that marvellous serendipity which is one of the joys of Crete (…)
  Richard Clark, Eastern Crete.

• The more we explored it the more we felt that Crete was gently revealing its secrets to us — scenery that could completely alter within a turn in the road (…)
  Philip Mann, Second Wind, Journey to a new life in Crete.

• [The Cretans have] more wit than words. Plato.

• He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan.
  Thomas Hardy.

• As it is in the proverb, played Cretan against Cretan.
  (i.e. lying to liars).
  Plutarch.

• But now, in these our detestable times, no maiden is safe, even if she is hidden and enclosed in another labyrinth like the one in Crete; because even there, through chinks in the wall, or carried by the air itself, with the zealousness of accursed solicitation the amorous pestilence finds its way in and, despite all their seclusion, maidens are brought to ruin. It was for their protection, as time passed and wickedness spread, that the order of knights errant was instituted: to defend maidens, protect widows, and come to the aid of orphans and those in need.
  Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra.

• We thought Crete the most beautiful island in the world: a miniature continent with its Alps, its deserts and jungles, its artics and its tropics, its Wales and Morocco and China, crammed into an area hardly bigger than Long Island (New York) or Devon plus Cornwall
  Rackham & Moody, The Making of the Cretan Landscape.

• Crete,’ I murmured. ‘Crete…’, And my heart beat fast.
  Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek.

• Crete, the largest, the southernmost, and the most solitary of the Greek islands, and the fifth-largest of the Mediterranean, floats halfway to Africa. It is a hundred and sixty miles long and roughly thirty broad, though wasp waists and swelling salients vary this girth. It is such a steep maze of gorges and crags that distances as the crow flies have no meaning; the islanders themselves measure them by the time taken to smoke cigarettes, by hours gauged by the climb or the decline of the sun, and days reckoned from daybreak to sunset; or, more often, during the Occupation, by the duration of nights. Thirty miles in some parts, meant three days (or nights) of scrambles up rocks and breakneck, treacherous descents of landslides.
  Only in the rare plains is the reckoning normal, and even there, the multiplicity of Germans made journeys a chain of detours that falsified all normal computation. All this expands Crete into many times its real size, and sometimes, in the central valleys, the sea seems as remote as from the heart of the continent.
  George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner.

• ‘Glyka Nera. Sweetwater Bay. The track leads there,’ said the waiter, answering Sarah’s unasked question. ‘It’s a bit of a walk, but the beach is beautiful.’ 
  Richard Clark, The Lost Lyra.

• I didn’t understand Heraklion
  its grit-grey port
  grotty even at sunrise (…)
  Dorothy Porter, Crete.

• As we curved around through the dry, harsh landscape of the Akrotiri Peninsula I heard Richard whisper again. ‘What have we done?’ I fought back the urge to echo him. Instead, I lightheartedly remarked, ‘We moved to a Mediterranean island and it’s an adventure, remember?’
  Melanie Crane, Uniquely Crete, Life redefined on a Greek island.

• Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions.
  Douglas Coupland.

• A gentle joyousness-a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.
  Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

• Blue island, give me back what is mine.
  Flying Crete, give back my work to me.
  Fill the baked vessel from the breasts of the flowing goddess
  Osip Mandelstam, Poem 385.

• But, as a form of exercise, I cannot recommend carrying a suitcase for a mile or so along sand and shingle at the dead of night, and then edging one’s way along a narrow path where a false step will mean plunging into a couple of fathoms of sea that, however quiet, is toothed like a shark with jagged fangs of rock.
  Mary Stewart, The Moonspinners.

• The Goddess of Old Europe and Ancient Crete represented the unity of life in nature, delight in the diversity of form, the powers of birth, death and regeneration.
  Carol P. Christ.

• Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.
  Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek.

• I’ve always wanted to see what Egypt was like when they were building the pyramids or Rome at the height of the empire or Greece – more specifically, Crete before it was destroyed. Why? Because I’m curious how we all hung out on a day-to-day basis, what was the chit chat, etc. Reading things in a book never gives you the feel.
  Albert Hammond Jr.

• There is a kind of flame in Crete – let us call it “soul” – something more powerful than either life or death. There is pride, obstinacy, valor, and together with these something else inexpressible and imponderable, something which makes you rejoice that you are a human being, and at the same time tremble.
  Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco.

• One cannot analyze the character of European gardens without looking beyond the Mediterranean. This is because horticulture, palace life, and city-building developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading, via Crete, Greece, Egypt, and Italy to the forests of Europe.
  Tom Turner.

• The Greek War of Independence, which came to a successful conclusion in 1832, affected less than one-half of the Greeks in the Turkish Empire. It did not bring freedom to the Greeks of Macedonia and Thrace, of Crete and the Aegean Islands, nor to the more than two million Greeks in Asia Minor and Constantinople.
  Henry Morgenthau, I was sent to Athens.

• Biffi said it was more American on an air force base in Crete than it was in Times Square.
  Cathleen Schine.

• I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer.
  Woody Allen.

• It is not as if Crete has become simply a place where I prefer to spend some free time. My obsession with the island has significantly shaped my life, become an integral part of my identity.
  Karl Malkoff, Crete: A Landscape of the Mind.

• The people of Crete, unfortunately, make more history than they can consume locally.
  Hector Hugh Munro.

• Leaving behind the somber Arkadi Monastery we head inland to a place often cited by lovers of the island as their favorite – the Amari Valley. Yet word has obviously, and fortunately, not spread.
  Richard Clark, Crete, A Notebook.

• Cretans, well, most Greeks I know it seems, have little appreciation of the concept of timed arrangements, or indeed the passage of time itself. That morning I noticed that the church bells rang six times at seven o’clock, when I commented on this to Dimitri he just smiled and said ‘God is slow…’
  Philip Mann, Second Wind, Journey to a new life in Crete.

• Early May brings Crete its most perfect and heaven-sent days. 
  Victoria Hislop, The Island.

• The Goddess of Old Europe and Ancient Crete represented the unity of life in nature, delight in the diversity of form, the powers of birth, death, and regeneration.
  Carol P. Christ.

• Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.
  Camille Paglia.

• I looked out the window of the airplane and strained to focus on the green and blue beneath me. My view of the island that had been my temporary home became obscured by clouds, or was it tears? This island reminded me of silk on stone, not just in its landscape defined by soft, luxurious water and hard, rugged earth, but in something deeper — a soul soother and beaten and soothed again like waves battering and then caressing the rocky shores of Crete.
  Melanie Crane, Uniquely Crete, Life redefined on a Greek island.

• Still, with the possible exception of the Bronze Age palace at Knossos, it is not history or its palpable remains that attract hordes of tourists. Crete is, after all, one of the Greek Islands, the largest, in fact, and, in spite of the ravages of undisciplined development, one of the most beautiful.
  Karl Malkoff, Crete: A Landscape of the Mind.

• The Lyra has the spirit of Crete at its core.
  Richard Clark, The Lost Lyra.

• ‘How beautiful Crete is,’ he murmured, ‘how beautiful! Ah! If only I were an eagle, to admire the whole of Crete from an airy height!’
  Nikos Kazantzakis, Freedom and Death.

• I have traveled to every continent in the world, but there is nowhere else that has the aesthetics of Greece. The sky here has a unique translucence, the sea is especially blue, the stars are brighter and the landscape is dramatic, particularly on Crete where I have my house.
  Victoria Hislop.

• When the moon rose he got up and 
  threw a last swig of raki down his 
  throat with the words “Another 
  drop of petrol for the engine,” 
  and loped towards the gap in 
  the bushes with the furtiveness 
  of a stage Mohican or Groucho 
  Marx. He turned round when 
  he was on all fours at the exit, 
  rolled his eyes, raised a 
  forefinger portentously, 
  whispered ‘the Intelligence 
  Service!’ and scuttled through 
  like a rabbit. A few minutes 
  later we could see his small 
  figure a mile away moving 
  across the next moonlit fold 
  of the foothills of the 
  White Mountains, bound for 
  another fifty-mile journey.
  George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner.

• An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave – I was quite all right on this Cretan coast and felt happy and free there and I needed nothing – but because I have always been consumed with one desire; to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die.
  Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek.

• I learned very quickly the nuances of Greek life in Crete simply by observing and inquiring. When you are a visitor in foreign lands, it’s advisable to ease into your surroundings by keeping your eyes open and your mouth shut.
  Melanie Crane, Uniquely Crete, Life redefined on a Greek island.

• Somewhere between the party town of Malia and the sleepy seaside resort of Sissi, the traveler from the capital will leave the prefecture of Heraklion and enter the region of Lasithi. In distance the journey is small, but in essence, it is monumental.
  Richard Clark, Eastern Crete.

• Men often become non-violent in societies that (1) have adequate amounts of food, (2) have adequate amounts of water, and (3) perceive themselves as isolated from attack. For example, the Tahitian men, the Minoan men on Crete, and the Central Malaysian Semai were nonviolent during the period in their history when all three of these conditions prevailed.
  Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power.

• We, who are dying, are doing better, than they, who will live. For Crete doesn’t need householders, she needs madmen like us. These madmen make Crete immortal.
  Nikos Kazantzakis, Freedom and Death.

• Cretans, well, most Greeks I know it seems, have little appreciation of the concept of timed arrangements, or indeed the passage of time itself. That morning I noticed that the church bells rang six times at seven o’clock, when I commented on this to Dimitri he just smiled and said ‘God is slow…’
  Philip Mann, Second Wind, Journey to a new life in Crete.

• For most people, the first experience of the tantalizing island of Crete will be Heraklion’s Nikos Kazantzakis International Airport. Let me assure you that things can only get better.
  Richard Clark, Crete, A Notebook.

• ‘Don’t be afraid to cry,’ said Elpida gently. ‘The boy will see plenty of tears here. Believe me, they’re shed freely on Spinalonga.
  Victoria Hislop, The Island.

• A magical portal opened inside my mind and conducted me into an astonishing world. … Before this moment I had divined but had never known with such positiveness that the world is extremely large and that suffering and toil are the companions and fellow warriors not only of Cretan, but of every man. … that by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song.
  Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco.

• The warlike habits of these centuries had left a burning nationalism, a free spirit, and the determination to resist foreign occupation at any sacrifice.
  George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner.

• At first blush, Crete seems stuck in time. Change comes slowly to the island. But it does come, as sure as the winter waves that undulate on its rocky shores; as sure as the seasons that nurture the island culture.
  Melanie Crane, Uniquely Crete, Life redefined on a Greek island.

• The best musicians have the power to reach out to every Cretan. They can empty their minds of everything, but the essence of what it is to be born to that magical island.
  Richard Clark, The Lost Lyra.

• The inhabitants of this largest island in the Greek archipelago, although fiercely loyal to Greece, see themselves as Cretans first and Greeks second.
  Richard Clark, Hidden Crete.

Which is your favorite quote?

Read more about Crete

• 50 Unmissable Things to Do in Crete: Fabulous Visit Guide
• Guide to Driving in Crete: Everything You Need to Know
• More than 35 Fun & Interesting Facts about Crete that will Surprise You!
• Best Books About Crete: Discover Crete from Home!
• Discover + 45 Most Gorgeous Beaches in Crete (A guide by an insider!)
• The Most Beautiful Monasteries in Crete: Guide to Visit

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More resources to enhance your Crete adventure

Start by checking out my ultimate guide to planning your trip to Crete, packed with helpful essential information. Explore the articles on prices in Crete, common mistakes to avoid, and insider secrets for an unforgettable experience.

When it’s time to plan, explore the best places to visit on Crete Island, discover my tours and activities, and be amazed at Crete’s incredible beaches. If you are exploring specific areas like Heraklion, Rethymnon, Lasithi, and Chania, I’ve got detailed guides to help you make the most of your time.

Suggested accommodation in Crete

No time to read all my accommodation guides? Check out these places to stay:

• Heraklion: So Young Hostel ($), Capsis Astoria ($$), Galaxy Hotel ($$$).
• Chania: Cocoon City Hostel ($), Porto Antico ($$), Hotel OFF ($$$).
• Rethymnon: Matthias Hotel ($), Archipelagos Hotel ($$), Avli ($$$).
• Agios Nikolaos: Villa Galini ($), Hotel Port 7 ($$), Minos Beach Art Hotel ($$$).

More useful travel resources

• Check out all the digital travel guides I’ve specifically written about Crete. They are affordable and practical to check from your mobile.
• Find convenient ferry tickets with Ferryhopper.
• Welcome Pickups offers a convenient pre-paid airport transfer service, while Discover Cars is my favorite engine for finding a rental car on the island.
• To book adventures, tours, and cultural experiences, I recommend Get Your Guide for its flexible cancellation policy.

Pin it Now! Inspiring Captions about Crete for Instagram Wanderlust!

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