Octavio Paz quotes

Deserve your dream. (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
Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.
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
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
To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
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 Paz
Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.
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
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
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone. (Octavio Paz)
Without democracy freedom is a chimera.
Octavio Paz
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
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
Octavio Paz
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Octavio Paz
Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
Octavio Paz
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
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
We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
Octavio Paz
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Octavio Paz
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)
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?
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
If you are the amber mare.
Octavio Paz
The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
Octavio Paz