Octavio Paz quotes
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“Deserve your dream.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger, G. Aroul (1984). “Selected Poems”, p.21, New Directions Publishing
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“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 -
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“For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“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 -
“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 – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“a human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“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 ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ 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 PazSource : The Labyrinth of Solitude ch. 9 (1950) (translation by Lysander Kemp)
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“Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 PazSource : Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.212, Grove Press
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“Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger (1991). “The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987”, p.171, New Directions Publishing
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“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“To love is to undress our names.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger (1991). “The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987”, p.23, New Directions Publishing
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“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 -
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“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 -
“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 -
“Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall-that of our consciousness-between the world and ourselves.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Language lies outside of society because it is its foundation; but it also lies within society because that is the only place where it exists and the only place where it develops.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“With great difficulty advancing by millimeters each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For millenniums my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work. I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.60, Grove Press
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“A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it he cannot grow or mature.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Watching I watch myself, what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts, what I watch watches me, I am the creation of what I see”
-- Octavio Paz -
“When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“listen to me as one listens to the rain, the years go by, the moments return, do you hear the footsteps in the next room? not here, not there: you hear them in another time that is now, listen to the footsteps of time, inventor of places with no weight, nowhere, listen to the rain running over the terrace, the night is now more night in the grove, lightning has nestled among the leaves, a restless garden adrift-go in, your shadow covers this page.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“...because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source. There is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of two in a single body, a single soul, oh total being...”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“I sat at the foot of a huge tree, a statue of the night, and tried to make an inventory of all I had seen, heard, smelled, and felt: dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction. What had attracted me? It was difficult to say: Human kind cannot bear much reality. Yes, the excess of reality had become an unreality, but that unreality had turned suddenly into a balcony from which I peered into—what? Into that which is beyond and still has no name…”
-- Octavio Paz -
“No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.66, Arcade Publishing
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“Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz (1995). “The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism”, Harcourt
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“Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, 'Not Yet,' and thus denies us... Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.283, Grove Press
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“Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“We pursue her in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity."”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz (1987). “1904-1912”, San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
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“The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“To love is to battle, to open doors. The world changes if two can look at each other and see.”
-- Octavio PazSource : "Piedra de Sol".
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“If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without; born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships "getting things done" but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.”
-- Octavio Paz -
“It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life? To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches this may be a program for life.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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“Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger, G. Aroul (1984). “Selected Poems”, p.118, New Directions Publishing
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“To fight evil is to fight ourselves.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz (1999). “Itinerary”
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“Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.”
-- Octavio PazSource : Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger, G. Aroul (1984). “Selected Poems”, p.26, New Directions Publishing
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“Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet.... The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.”
-- Octavio Paz -
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