Octavio Paz quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Octavio Paz on Wise Famous Quotes.

For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death

The past reappears because it is a hidden present.

Death is the mother of forms.

No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.

Is not really a system of painting but a method of internal investigation. It is not the philosophy of painting but painting as philosophy.

Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay - or, rather, or analysis - to movement.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.

Human nature is universial, and it endures through all cultures and epochs. This is the secret of perenniality of certain poems and books.

If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.

To love is to battle, to open doors. The world changes if two can look at each other and see.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift.

Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.

Everything is language.

In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.

A saint speaks with God or with himself, two forms of silence.

Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.

Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.

Poet: gardener of epitaphs.

The world stretches before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.

Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.

Loving means getting rid of names.

To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.

The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.

To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.

Solitude is the profoundest fact

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.

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.

The world is born when two people kiss

Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.

The woman who died night after night
and her dying was a long goodbye,
a train that never left.

I do not know if the story repeats itself: I only know that people change little

To love is to undress our names.

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

Light is time thinking about itself.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us

All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.

Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary - or would not be fixity.

The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

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.

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words.

Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.

To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile,

Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.

Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.

Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.

Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
Like the oak and linden of fable.
To learn to see

Every moment is nothing without end.

A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.

The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.

Whatever is not stone is light

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers ... What we call art is a game.

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.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Deserve your dream.

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.

Desire turns us into ghosts

The value of e-commerce is not in the e, but in the commerce.

I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.
("The Blue Bouquet")

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.

I do not condemn the cult of pleasure; I lament the general vulgarity.

To fight evil is to fight ourselves.

To become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity.

For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom.