Octavio Paz Quotes: top 83 famous quotes about Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Quotes & Sayings

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

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society. — Octavio Paz

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

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

The past reappears because it is a hidden present. — Octavio Paz

Death is the mother of forms. — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

Without democracy freedom is a chimera — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

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

Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift. — Octavio Paz

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

Everything is language. — Octavio Paz

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

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

Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves. — Octavio Paz

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

Poet: gardener of epitaphs. — Octavio Paz

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

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences. — Octavio Paz

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

Loving means getting rid of names. — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

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

Solitude is the profoundest fact — Octavio Paz

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

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

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life. — Octavio Paz

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

The world is born when two people kiss — 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

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

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

To love is to undress our names. — Octavio Paz

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

Light is time thinking about itself. — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

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

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate. — 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

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival. — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 — Octavio Paz

Every moment is nothing without end. — Octavio Paz

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

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

Whatever is not stone is light — Octavio Paz

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

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

Deserve your dream. — Octavio Paz

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

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

Desire turns us into ghosts — Octavio Paz

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

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

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

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

To fight evil is to fight ourselves. — Octavio Paz

To become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity. — Octavio Paz

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