Octavio Paz Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“Whatever is not stone is light”
-- Octavio Paz

#Light #Stones
“Deserve your dream.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Dream #Deserve
“Poet: gardener of epitaphs.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Design #Poet #Epitaph
“I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?”
-- Octavio Paz

#Stars #Giants #Phrases
“For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Men #Language #Disappear
“Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Justice #Democracy #Possibility
“Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Men #Thinking #Doe
“Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there â€“ the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Soul #Desire #Noble
“a human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Self #Humans
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has â€˜inventedâ€™ himself by saying â€˜noâ€™ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Men #Solitude #Saying No
“Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Lying #Learning #Two
“What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Art #Age #Criticism
“Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Confused #Yesterday #Space
“What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life”
-- Octavio Paz

#Views #Civilization #Differences
“Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Men #Thinking #Mirrors
“Without democracy freedom is a chimera”
-- Octavio Paz

#Democracy #Chimera #Democracy Freedom
“Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Waiting
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Loneliness #Being Alone #Men
“To love is to undress our names.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Love Is #Names
“There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Two #Sometimes #Poetic
“I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Believe #Book #Passion
“Ruy-Sanchez's works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry and intelligence in a new geometry of words... His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Writing #Adventure #Mood
“Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Quality #Speak #Poet
“If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Suicide #Spiritual #Commit
“Solitude is the profoundest fact”
-- Octavio Paz

#Solitude #Facts
“The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics--or more precisely, Revolution--co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Spiritual #Art #Museums
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Real #Criticism #Synthesis
“Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Ideas #Evil #Drug
“What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Life #Differences #World
“Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.”
-- Octavio Paz

#Art #Yawning #Abyss

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