Octavio Paz Quotes (24 Quotes)


    The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death. (He) jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.

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

    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.

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

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


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

    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.

    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.

    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.

    The electoral process of July 6 perhaps represents a new era in the history of Mexico.

    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.

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

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


    A glass pitcher, a wicker basket, a tunic of coarse cotton cloth. Their beauty is inseparable from their function. Handicrafts belong to a world existing before the separation of the useful and the beautiful.

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

    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.

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

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

    Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

    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.

    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.

    What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions life is plurality, death is uniformity.

    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.


    More Octavio Paz Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - World - Speaking - Time - Love - Language - Art - History - Thought & Thinking - Literature - Sense & Perception - Death & Dying - Reality - Education - Poetry - War & Peace - Dialectic - Nature - Computers & Technology - View All Octavio Paz Quotations

    Related Authors


    Rabindranath Tagore - Maya Angelou - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Alexander Pope - Aeschylus - Thomas Gray - Rainer Maria Rilke - Lucretius - Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Dylan Thomas


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections